One of the most iconic opening lines from all of world literature comes from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The British author was comparing and contrasting life in London and Paris, but he might as well have been discussing inshore fishing during the month of December in south Louisiana. This is either the best month of the year, or the absolute worst, and sometimes it’s both. It all depends on the weather.
December is the most bipolar of the months. It can’t decide if it wants to be the most docile of falls or harshest of winters. Many years, local residents wear shorts to Christmas gatherings. Other Decembers are legendarily bitter. Take 1989, for instance. An Arctic blast steamrolled the area that year on Dec. 22, bringing snow and freezing local lakes and bays. Baton Rouge didn’t get above freezing for three days, and recorded a low temperature of 8 degrees F on Dec. 23.
Not exactly prime conditions for throwing soft-plastic baits over grass flats. Fortunately, events like that are the exception, but still, December is an enigmatic month, and local anglers can use its ebbs and flows to follow the fish.
Although the extremes can occur, the more general pattern is for cold fronts to push through once every five days or so, with nighttime lows kissing freezing on the second night after the front. For a day or two, winds will be out of the north, barometric pressure will rise and cold-blooded speckled trout will have the mental capacity of a can of spray cheese. Their brains just don’t work properly in cold conditions, and their bodies barely obey their brains, anyway. They’re like the iguanas in South Florida that fall from trees during cold snaps.
In these conditions, the fish stack up in deep-water thermoclines, and if the water there is warm enough, and you get a bait directly in front of their noses, you might get a bite every single cast. But many times, even if you stumble on a massive school, they’ll be physically incapable of biting a bait. That lasts for two or three days following the front, and then winds gain a southerly component, bringing air up from the warmer Gulf and driving daytime highs into the 60s and sometimes 70s. That’s when fishing can get really fun.
As soon as waters start to warm, the fish get frisky. Nature has taught them they have a limited window to get something in their bellies before the next front once again turns them into blithering idiots. Although deep thermoclines held the warmest of the water during the harshest of the cold, that’s no longer true. Flats exposed to the warming air, particularly on sunny days, heat up quickly, and the fish fan out over them searching for bait, mostly glass minnows and remaining white shrimp.
Fish in this mode are more aggressive and far less school-oriented, so the best way to target them is to repeatedly drift productive flats, throwing jerkbaits , soft-plastic paddletails on light jigheads, and shrimp-imitations under popping corks. And actually, if the warming trend is a little longer in duration and water temps on the flats reach the 60s, topwaters can become more productive than any other style of lure, particularly for big speckled trout.
That’s especially true on flats that feature scattered grass, pretty water and even just a few jumping mullet. It’s one of the most consistent patterns of the year, and is the main reason December rates so highly among hardcore anglers who ignore the hunting seasons to focus on the fish. For them, it’s mostly just the best of times.
