Saltwater & Coastal

Jetty rock bends current into seams and eddies and grows the food baitfish come for. Where to stand comes down to current, depth, waves and footing, and the tip isn’t automatically the answer.

The same steel and rock that pull grouper and snapper in will happily keep your sinker, so a lot of wreck fishing comes down to boat position and rigging cheap enough to lose.

Tide stage decides where the food goes on a surf beach. That’s why the stretch that was dead at breakfast can deserve a second look after lunch.

On a flat, a hull slap or one heavy step can end the shot before you ever cast, which means how you move matters about as much as what you tie on.

Current squeezing through a pass builds the seams fish feed on — and when ocean swell runs into the outgoing tide, it builds the standing waves that catch small boats off guard.

Dumping ground fish over the side sounds like the easy job on the boat, right up until the slick drifts away from the reef you set up on. Boat position and a steady drip decide most of it.

Live bait isn’t automatically the upgrade, and dead bait isn’t just what you use after the minnows die. They send fish different signals, and the species you’re after decides a lot of which one’s worth the trouble.

A really big fish will outlast your arms no matter how many push-ups you did. The fighting chair and the stand-up harness are two different ways around that, and each one charges you for it somewhere.

A three-foot sea forecast doesn’t mean nothing out there is bigger than three feet, and wave period plus the ride home matter as much as the wind number when you’re deciding whether to go at all.

A kite hangs a live bait at the surface far from the boat, with almost no line in the water to spook anything — a big reason kites became the standard technique for sailfish.