Live Bait Guide

Fishing with live bait has gotten us tons of bites from rod-bending, line-smoking fish. Here in Florida, we favor live bait over using artificial lures (in most cases). Like with fishing for bigger fish, you need to have basic skills in getting live bait fish.

In King Mackerel fishing, we typically use medium to large cigar minnows as well as threadfin herring. Threadfins, because of their large size and great trolling swim, are our bait of choice for King fishing. We keep the small cigar minnows in the boat's live well for Drum fishing inshore. When it comes to Grouper and Flounder, we use live menhaden. Bluewater fishermen traditionally use live bonito to catch Billfish.

Live shrimp are good too for snapper and other inshore species.

Lots of anglers say that live bait will out-fish artificial. That is NOT true, and I can attest to that. Sometimes live bait works better, other times artificial baits work just as well. You want your bait, fake or real, to swim and smell as natural as possible. A bigger sport fish tends to swim right past a bait that is spinning or not swimming real-like. So, that is why some people favor live bait. I don't see anything wrong with artificial lures, but you have to be sure that you are buying something that has a natural swimming ability. If the frozen cigar minnows are spinning, for example, take them out of the water and use another hookup, or go with a Yozuri Deep Diver.

Don't use too big of a hook when putting your bait on. Use a hook that is proportionate to the size of your bait. Another good tip is to never hook your live bait through the eyes. You want your bait fish to see the bigger fishing coming after it. This will make your bait scared and try to escape, which further entices big fish to strike. With our threadfin herring, we hook the fish up through the nose with a 1/0 hook and put a #4 treble hook in it's back, with a second treble hook dangling at the end as a "stinger." Then, while we're trolling and a big fish is about to strike it, the bait fish will speed up and swim erratically. Also, if you're using live bait hooked through the eyes and you go to cast it, the hooks tend to come out.

Many don't believe this but big baits tend to catch big fish. Smaller baits usually get smaller bites, most of the time. In our experience, threadfin get more bites than cigar minnows. We've caught the majority of our bigger fish on big live baits.

Catching live bait isn't the hardest thing to do, but sometimes they can be hard to find. Back in southeastern North Carolina, we found menhaden in the shallow edges of the Cape Fear River and Intra-Coastal Waterway. In the Florida Panhandle, we find menhaden in shallow waters as well, especially in and around Ben's Lake of Eglin Air Force Base. If the school was big enough, we threw out the 10' cast net and captured 200 at a time. As for finding cigar minnows and threadfins, they are harder to find. In NC, cigar minnows were usually around artificial reef markers. We typically found them around 5 to 10 miles offshore. In FL, we find threadfin and cigar minnows around the jetties. Of course, you can always find a live bait store or live bait boat on the water and buy your baits for a few bucks.

With any bait search, you need to keep your eyes and ears open. You need to look for baits hitting the top of the water. You'll also hear the patter of water as they splash around, usually feeding on tiny minnows at the surface. As I said before, with live menhaden, it's best to use a cast net to get them. With other baits, you need your rod and reel. The best way to catch cigar minnows and threadfins as well as bluefish is by using a sabiki rig. Cast it right into the center of the school and jig it while reeling it in. For bonito, you can do several things to catch them, from trolling Clark spoons around the school to casting the McDonald's straw rig right to them.

Next time you go fishing, give live bait a shot. It's not only fun to catch your own, but it's an amazing feeling being able to catch smaller fish to catch bigger fish.