Night Flounder Gigging

In most states, gigging is a legal method for taking flounder or fluke. Usually done at night, it is more for the adventurous angler, but any of you can do this and come home with some great table fare!

Gigging is a nighttime activity, which is the major reason it becomes an angling method for the more adventurous among us. It involves either wading from shore or floating in a small boat over the shallow areas where flounder congregate. It requires relatively clear and shallow water, a good, heavy duty gig head, a high candlepower light source, and just a little schooling on what to look for on the bottom.

Flounder will settle on the bottom, back-flap their fins, and essentially cover themselves with the surrounding sand. The only visible part, short of a slight outline of their body, is their two eyes sticking up just above the sand.

The process is rather straightforward. Find an area where flounder gather at night, and light up the bottom. As you wade or float over the bottom, look for a pair of red glowing eyes sticking up from the sand. Be careful to identify two things, (1) which direction is the fish pointing, and (2) how far apart are the eyes. 

Most states have size limits on flounder and it will pay you to remember how far apart the eyes need to be for a flounder to be long enough to be legal.

Once you locate a pair of eyes and determine which end of the fish is the business end, it becomes a matter of driving the gig home just behind the eyes. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Now for a few words of caution! I prefer a single pronged gig head. That is, it has but one long tang with a good barb. The tang itself is about a half-inch in diameter. This is not a thin wire frog gig. When you drive the gig home, make sure you pin the fish to the bottom until he stops kicking. Only then should you lift him out of the water. The lifting process also requires a bit of caution. Don’t pull the gig straight back toward you, rather try to lift it out of the water as if you were trying to scoop something off the bottom with a shovel. This prevents the gig from backing out of the fish from the water pressure exerted on the side of the fish.

My particular methods for night gigging involve either wading or floating a small boat, as I said. If I am wading, I like to take a ten-foot long, two-inch dowel, on which I hang a gasoline lantern. I place the lantern on one end of the pole, a balancing weight on the other, and wrap a soft towel around the middles of the pole. I then balance the lantern and counter weight on my shoulder, so that they will remain stationary as I walk.

I shield the side of the lantern that faces me so as not to blind myself. Then I wade slowly in the area I plan to fish. The long pole and counterbalance serve to stabilize themselves when I thrust the gig, allowing me to use both hands when required.

One word of caution is appropriate here. Don’t let the lantern touch the water! That hot surface will literally cause the glass to explode when it hits the water. A little practice prior to embarkation is definitely in order.

When I gig from a boat, I use lighting that may be foreign to many of you. I have modified a metal car top carrier bar and fitted it with four sealed beam headlamps, the same kind we use on an automobile. They are mounted so they point straight up if the bar were mounted across the roof of an auto. The connections have all been waterproofed, and the wiring to the lamps is of six gauge, insulated copper.

I take the headlamp arraignment and drop it over the bow with a line attached to each side. I then draw the bar so that it is about one quarter of the way back from the bow and strapped across the bottom of the boat. If you picture this properly, you know that the headlamps are now pointed at the sea bottom.  Once securely strapped in place, I connect the wiring to one of the three auto batteries in the boat.

Bingo! The bottom directly under the boat is lit up like a ballpark. The angle of the light to the front of the boat allows any eyes that are protruding from the bottom to be seen as I stand on the bow of the boat.

Now, all it takes is someone helping you pole the boat, or run an electric trolling motor!

One more word of caution: If you see a pair of eyes that are four or more inches apart, be prepared for a ride! Eyes that wide mean a double-digit doormat, and they are not the easiest thing to handle, especially on the end of a gig! And if you are wading and see these eyes, I would strongly suggest handing the gig to someone who is not carrying the lantern! Otherwise, you can kiss a perfectly good gasoline lantern goodbye!

How about you? Have you ever caught fish using a non-traditional method? Tell us about it on our Reader Submission Page, or on our Saltwater Fishing Forum!

Night Fishing Tips

Tony's dad dropped us off at the docks. It was about 6:30 PM and the charter boat sailed for a night fishing trip at 7PM. The boat was docked at the old Pier 5 charter boat basin in Miami, and to both Tony's and my surprise we had received parental permission to be on this big boat without adult supervision! I found out years later that his dad and mine had called ahead to the charter captain to make sure he watched out for us. I think they even slipped the captain some extra money when they picked us up after the trip. At any rate, this was my first experience at night fishing, and it would be followed by many more over the next few years.

Night fishing can be very easy and a lot of fun, or it can be a perfectly miserable experience. The difference comes in how you prepare for the trip. I have fished more times at night than I can count, and I learned quite a few tricks to make it easy and successful.

First of all, pick a night when the weather forecast is good. It is tough enough moving and finding things in the dark - bad weather just makes it worse, and a whole lot more dangerous.

Second, make sure your boat and engine are in good working order. Breaking down in the daylight is bad enough; you don't want this to happen at night. Trust this voice of experience on this!

Next, go through your boat inch by inch, making sure everything is in its place and secure. Go through each tackle box you plan to take and locate every item you think you may need. This may sound silly, but you need to study the inside of your boat and your tackle boxes. You need to have a visual knowledge of where everything is located. You will be tested on this during the fishing trip, so study ahead in order to pass! There are not many things as frustrating as trying to locate that pair of pliers, or those 8/0 hooks in the dark.

Speaking of in the dark, make sure you have several light sources. My current boat has indirect lighting all the way around underneath the gunnels. Have additional flashlights and a good high candle power beam stored dry and safe. Bring extra batteries, too.

Pre-tie enough leaders and terminal rigs to last you the entire trip. They don't go bad, so tying a few too many just means a few more for the next trip.

Probably most important, if you plan to anchor and bottom fish, is to get out before the sun goes down and get set up. Few things are more difficult than anchoring a boat properly over a ledge or reef in the dark.

As far as fishing methods go, I have two that work very well.

Night fishing becomes a matter of either smell or movement. That means fish must sense either wounded prey moving or they must sense the smell of food. So my two methods involve setting out a good chum line, fishing cut or strip bait in the chum, and fishing a live bait either freelined just outside the chum slick or on the bottom.

Fish frenzy brings on fish frenzy, so if you anchored in a known good area, the better the chum slick gets, the more the fish are attracted. Many fish are predominantly night feeders, like some of the snapper family. Others feed because of the frenzy. Whatever their reason for feeding, they are far more cooperative at night. You will find that the larger of the species will more readily bite at night. They become less wary, and can't see line or leader.

In the areas I have fished, yellowtail snapper, grouper, mangrove (or gray) snapper, mutton snapper, and an occasional king mackerel will be the predominant catch. Of course sharks are always looking for a free meal, and at night you are likely to encounter the larger versions of the that species as well.

Take along a first aid kit. I know we all have one on the boat, but double check yours before you go. Sometimes it's hard to tell the seriousness of a cut or puncture at night. Be prepared for anything.

Night fishing is wonderful if you approach it right. It is just a matter of being prepared.

Oh, about that first trip that Tony and I went on. We caught a few nice snapper. The old timers on the stern caught a boatload! Remember, it was a party boat. The stern was already taken by grown-ups, and the current would not let us get our baits into the chum slick directly behind the boat.

I learn something every time I fish. I wonder if that captain would have put us on the stern if he knew ahead of time that he would be in for a good tip......

Light up your Night!

Last winter I was bouncing around on a message board and found a member who was making his own LED lights, I noticed that a lot of other members had tried his products and seemed very happy with them. I had been on the lookout for new spreader lights for my boat since my standard Halogens would either burnout from getting wet, or would just stop working for no apparent reason and that particular model was extremely had to find without contacting my boat manufacturer.

One really great thing about switching to these LED lights is the way they provide their visibility. Instead of one powerful light reflecting off the sides of the housing, you have dozens of little ones which create less heat and they draw 0.5 amps per, saving your batteries. A great thing about using these is when I’m chunking at night, I would rarely turn my deck lights on because they created such a glare and even just looking at the deck would hurt my eyes and I knew that this was most definitely causing visibility issues for passing boats. With LED’s, your lighting is much softer and there is very little glare so I feel comfortable having these lights on all the time when I’m anchored up at night and I’m no longer worried about draining my batteries since I’m normally running all of my electronics and livewell which need a lot of power.

The thing that really separates Coastal Night Lights from the large manufacturers is that your getting more than what you pay for. You can spend upwards of a couple hundred dollars to get some LED lights for your boat from some factory in China. Or you can spend less money and get something made by a fellow boater that’s going to work just as good, or better.

Chris provides a great product at a great price and amazing customer service. Send him an email and get your boat lit up the right way. He also has a line of underwater LED’s and LED light strips.

See all the styles and options available at Coastal Night Lights.

Kyle Ondrey
Senior Writer/Director of Marketing - Northeast Angling