For Wintertime Trout on Suspending Plugs, Go Slow and Not-So-Steady
When the subject turns to saltwater fishing technique, it’s risky to draw absolutes at any time of year. If you are going to take a shot at it, however … specifically, while considering how to best take a shot at wintertime trout … it’s as close to an absolute in my ever-expanding Coastal Angling Book of Theories that you simply cannot beat a suspended mullet-imitating plug as potent hardware for oversized speckled trout. 
As suspending offerings have gained numbers in recent years, their “difficulty ranking” has remained higher than most … certainly higher than the expertise required to effectively juke a topwater plug. The same repeated “twitch, pause, twitch” tempo of a surface-scratcher can be just as effective on the sending side of a suspender, but, the rhythm of the lure is arguably more difficult to master. The same principle holds true for all plugs during winter. If you fish them too fast, you’re likely to fail. Sure, there are exceptions. But even after four consecutive days of post-frontal warmup, Upper Coast bay water temps in even the most sun-susceptible shallows rarely nudge and hold above the low 60s.
Fish are cold-blooded creatures. Their metabolism is dictated by water temperature. The lower the water temp, the slower the reaction of your quarry. Thus, the emphasis on a calculated, methodically downgraded lure retrieve.
Mullet are the primary menu items for cold-weather specks, particularly big ones. Mullet-mimicking plugs only make sense from the “match the hatch” perspective.
There is, all the same, a big difference between bona fide topwaters (MirrOlure Top Dogs and She Dogs, Rapala Skitterwalks and Heddon Super Spooks, to name just a few) and suspending plugs (MirrOlure 51MRs. 52MRs, Catch 2000s, and suspending Corkys, to name just a few more). That difference is always noteworthy, but never more pronounced than during the frigid months of winter.
Topwaters come back to the reel with water below and cold air above. Suspending baits, being underwater, remain submerged throughout the retrieve. As such, when they are smacked by a tantalized trout they are much more prone to result in hooksets. The liquid resistance above keeps the lure from flying free upon impact, and as such greatly increases strike-to-hookup ratios.
Color choice, I believe, is not as critical as the rate at which a given plug is retrieved. The best way, perhaps, to determine the ultimate retrieve rate is to observe baitfish working in your chosen area (if the baitfish are not there, even just a few random mullet, don’t choose the area).
When was the last time you watched a surface-hugging mullet move across the water with an uninterrupted, back-and-forth “walk?”
It doesn’t happen.
The fish move a short distance, and then almost invariably hold in place before moving again.
To be a successful coastal angler, you have to think like a fish. Just as importantly, you have to make your lure act like one.
Blaine Friermood, a Trinity Bay-based fishing pro who is beyond argument one of the Texas Coast’s foremost trout fishermen, showed me almost 15 years ago just how dramatic the mindset change can be for an angler who is prone to over-work hardware.
Friermood and I were wade fishing an extended, mud-bottomed point near Trinity Bay’s Vingt-Et-Un Islands, throwing lure designer Paul Brown’s B&L Corky. We were standing side by side when he caught his third large trout in a half-dozen casts. I had yet to score.
“Tell you what,” Friermood proffered. “Cast that lure as far as you can.”
I chunked the bone/chartreuse Corky as hard as I could.
“Now,” he said, “tell me a joke.”
“I can’t think of one right offhand,” I responded.
“Well,” he answered, “just do your best. Mostly, don’t touch that reel handle for at least another 30 seconds.”
I know better than to argue with a guy who is kicking my butt, so I did what he suggested.
“Now,” he said, “turn the reel handle half a turn.”
“Half a turn?”
“Yeah, half a turn. Now wait another 30 seconds.”
The wait only lasted half that long, at which point the 7-foot trout rod was almost pulled from my grip.
We caught trout … big trout … for the next hour or so. Unless I was picking up the lure to re-cast … which was done when the bait was only a rod length away … I never went past a half-crank of the reel on the retrieve.
It is considerably more difficult to sufficiently slow a retrieve when casting for cold-weather trout. It’s even more difficult immediately after catching a fish, when adrenaline overpowers instruction and you are inexorably compelled to go back to steady casting and cranking.
However, if ever patience paid, it was that day with Friermood. I’ve been using that methodical lure retrieve ever since with every imaginable brand of suspending plug, and it has paid off far more often than not.
It’s not an absolute producer. Still, for upping the odds of wintertime success, this is one proven practice that you can’t afford to ignore.
If you slow down enough to try it one time, and get the results I’m talking about, it will absolutely blow your mind.
Howdy. I am 
