Flounder are widely available along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, providing outstanding fishing opportunities for anglers who understand their behavior. Here’s what you need to know.
They’re the pickpockets of the sea. Skilled and sneaky, they blend into their surroundings, snatch what they want and then disappear back into concealment. We’re talking about flounder, the fish that looks like it was run over by a dump truck and conceals itself with Bigfoot-level hide-and-seek skills.
Gulf and Atlantic waters hold a few different flounder types, but all follow the same basic playbook: Position along the course of forage travel and pick off meals with speed and stealth.
Suffice to say, this fish’s thin profile, a lie-in-wait feeding strategy, and a brilliant camouflage pattern make it very efficient at nabbing any prey that wanders too close. A sudden flurry of displaced sediment and this ultimate sneakster settles back to the bottom. A few flutters of the flounder’s extreme edges serve to replace the sediment cloak, and it’s back to stake-out mode.
As a longtime flats fisherman, I’ve caught most of my flounder incidentally, often while hopping jigs or twitching soft plastic jerkbaits over shallow grass in hopes of tempting spotted seatrout or redfish. Nearly every flatty I’ve boated tricked me into thinking I’d snagged a stalk.
For the angler accustomed to boiling strikes, rod flexing fury and spirited runs, you might to be let down. However, the second you come tight to “clear your bait,” the fluttering flounder shows it’s no pushover.
Likely Flounder Locations
Jacksonville, Florida’s Capt. Chris Holleman said he finds his greatest flounder consistency in extremely shallow water. Falling tides favor this predator’s style, as water leaving the marshes and backwaters brings food to the waiting fish.
As the water rises, Holleman typically finds flounder nosing up to the grass edges. To that point, when you’re working jigs or weedless-rigged plastics through marsh grass lanes for redfish, pausing the bait once it leaves the grass and letting it fall to the perimeter bottom is a good way to score a bonus flounder bite.
On a recent trip with Holleman, we were targeting weakfish — a species my host described as favoring bottom-hugging presentations. I knew I was in the right zone when I caught three flounder, including a respectable “eater” in a 30-minute window.
Noting the need to give any suspected flounder bite a couple of seconds for the fish to fully engulf the bait, Holleman advises constant attention to every retrieve. After hundreds of casts, it’s easy to snooze on the end of a retrieve, but if you’re fishing where flounder are likely, inattention may rob you of opportunities.
“I’ve seen flounder try to eat a spoon when I was redfishing,” Holleman said. “I’d be reeling in my spoon, and right as I’d be bringing it up, I’d see flounder following my spoon.”
Common Flounder Scenarios
Docks: Holleman likes the ones with distinct ledges or drop-offs at the end, as this provides a natural approach and safety zone for fish coming and going. He’ll weave in and out of a line of docks and adjust with the tide — closer to shore on high water, farther out with outgoing tides.
Holleman favors a YUM Pulse swimbait on a light jighead.
“It can be difficult to fish when the tide is running hard,” he said. “That’s why I like a medium tide.”
Rocky Stuff: While most flounder catches are made over sandy, grassy, sometimes softer bottoms, don’t overlook solid structure like shallow rock reefs. Slowly trace the perimeter with a YUM Pulse Swimbait or a YUM Money Minnow and you might find a big flounder exploiting this food magnet.
Similarly, Holleman likes a bulkhead skirted by rocks, especially when those rocks form a point.
“When an outgoing tide is running up to the point, any baitfish coming down the bank are forced to make a turn around that (contour change),” Holleman said. “I’ll present my bait at this intercept point.”
For shallow water cast-and-retrieve presentations, or vertical ups and downs, Holleman favors the YUM Pulse on a 1/8- to 1/4-ounce head. In lower visibility and/or overcast conditions, a little flash and thump can help the stationary flounder detect your approaching bait, so he’ll often add a clip-on spinner blade to his jighead.
“You can vertically jig it on the rocks, and when it falls, that blade attracts the flounder,” he said. “The flounder will be waiting there to run out and grab the bait like they’re jumping off a staircase.”
Another option: Work a shallow diver like a Cotton Cordell Red Fin over the rocks and off the bottom edge. Any flounder sitting in hunt mode won’t be able to resist this baitfish profile.
Bridges & Piers: As with any solid structure, the pilings that support these elevated platforms break and redirect current. That means slack water for ambush feeding and current eddies that bring food through predictable lanes.
On piers, or bridges with pedestrian/fishing lanes, a common mistake anglers make is casting as far as they can from the very structure to which many catchable fish relate. For mackerel, bluefish, tarpon, etc., the perimeter waters can certainly offer promise, but flounder tuck tight.
T-shaped piers offer the proper angle for casting baits beneath the structure, but when traffic is light and you can claim a good section, making long parallel casts with a YUM Pulse allows you to test several consecutive pilings and gaps. Sooner or later, you’ll dial in some consistencies. At night, your prime areas will almost always be found under the light rings where baitfish tend to gather.
Jetties: Among the most overlooked of flounder habitats, these manmade rock piles guarding coastal inlets work the same way as those riprap edges Holleman described. As tides move water past this solid structure, flounder have their pick of shrimp and several baitfish species.
On slack tides, a fresh shrimp, finger mullet, or scaled sardine rigged on a jighead and hung beneath a Bomber Paradise Popper X-treme allows you to walk your bait through promising zones. When the water’s moving, rig a YUM Pulse or Money Minnow on a YUM Money Minnow Weighted Hook and bounce it along the edge of the rocks.
On Florida’s east side, coastal jetties offer major flounder feeding opportunities during the late-summer through early-fall mullet run. When incoming tides suck thousands of mullet into the inlets and scatter them along seawalls, mangrove edges, bridges and anything acting as a sideline.
“The majority of time when I’m flounder fishing, I have to scrounge them up,” Holleman said. “There’s not really a flounder bite. But it does happen during the mullet run.”
When that mullet influx is in full swing, anglers throw a lot of topwaters and mid-depth swimbaits, as this appeals to the snook, tarpon, redfish and jacks that are mostly feeding up. But crawl a mullet-mimicking soft body swimbait like the YUM Money Minnow or a lip-hooked finger mullet past the obvious ambush points and you might connect with a legit doormat.
Underestimated Aggression
Unlike persnickety snook or highly mobile redfish, flounder are not a complicated lot. Sure, they’ll relocate for spawning migrations and seasonal temperature adjustments, but day-to-day, they’ll pick a promising spot and park there.
This truth simplifies the angler’s strategies. Specifically, you may not think of flounder as a chasing predator, but in the right scenario, their quickness and aggression will impress.
“In the Intracoastal Waterway, when the water's barely over their backs, I’ve seen flounder jump out of the water chasing baitfish or shrimp,” Holleman said.
However you catch your flounder, be careful with the handling. Those snapping jaws work just as fast out of the water as they do in the water. And take it from someone who’s made the mistake of getting too close to the business end — when one of those needlelike teeth pierces your fingertip, you’ll learn a new definition of pain.
If you’re releasing a flounder, just keep the fish in the water and use a dehooking tool. When you’re fishing for dinner, the narrow head makes a natural gripping spot, so pinch right over the gill covers and you’ll keep yourself behind the danger zone.
