Entry 223-5

Sleeper Lures for Redfish with Ray Van Horn

Part 5: Opposites Attract

Quesion: Ray, how long have you and C.A. been fishing redfish tournaments together?

Van Horn: This is our fifth year fishing together. As far as teams go, we probably have been fishing together longer than most. C.A. and I are the odd couple. We’re completely opposite. C.A. is a very-technical fisherman. He’s a push pole, patient, take-your-time kind of fisherman, and I’m a power angler. We’d be like Kevin VanDam and George Cochran paired together in a bass tournament. Kevin keeps his foot on the trolling motor, makes a thousand casts an hour and flies down the bank. George will pull up to a stump, a log or a treetop and make 20 or 30 casts fishing behind and in front of every limb and crawling a lure next to every stump root before he leaves that cover. I’ll cover a mile of shoreline with my style of fishing in an hour, and C.A. will fish that same mile of shoreline from before Partlight until after dark.

Quesion: How in the world do the two of you fish in the same boat?

Van Horn: Opposites attract. His strengths are my weaknesses, and his weaknesses are my strengths. So, we feel we’ve got all the bases covered, regardless of what the redfish are doing, how they’re biting, or what they’re eating. In a 3-Part tournament, conditions change so much that sometimes during the tournament, I’ll need to fish like C.A., and on the next Part, he may need to fish like me. We practice in two different boats before a tournament, and we’ll usually fish hundreds of miles apart. We camp everywhere we go, so we centrally locate our RV to meet every night. For instance, when we go to Orange Beach to practice, we’ll park our camper near Gulfport, Mississippi. C.A. will fish the marsh from Mississippi to Louisiana, and I’ll fish the waters from the Mississippi line to the Florida line. Then every evening, we’ll return to the camper and compare notes to see who’s found the most fish, and what technique is catching them. Then we’ll develop a game plan for the tournament. When tournament Part arrives, we decide which one of us has found the most redfish and which tactic is producing the most redfish, and that’s the way we’ll fish the tournament.

Quesion: How did you start fishing with Strike King?

Van Horn: Denny Brauer and Mike Wurm are both really-good friends of mine. I told Denny that I thought Strike King had a lot of lures I could use to catch redfish. I also told him I liked Strike King’s attitude towards the company’s pro staff. Strike King listens to its pro staff and design the lures the pro staff tells them they need to catch fish and win. You can look at the people who make up Strike King and tell the company is angler-driven. I told Denny I’d really like to get involved with Strike King, and Denny opened the door for me with the company’s management team. We’ve been really excited about working with them. We also use Strike King products on our TV show, “Flats Class,” which is a instructional inshore salt-water fishing show where we teach our viewers how to catch more fish.

Quesion: Where does your show air?

Van Horn: It airs on Fox Sports South from North Carolina to Louisiana. It’s also on the Sunshine Network in Florida. We cover the states from the North Carolina border to the Texas border to the Florida border.

Quesion: Why did you think bass baits would catch redfish?

Van Horn: When you’re fishing, you have to understand the predator/prey relationship. Most game fish, whether they’re freshwater or saltwater, feed off other fish or animals in the waters they inhabit. Whether you’re in freshwater or saltwater, many of the prey species resemble each other. The vehicle you ride in to reach the fish and the depth and the clarity of the water you fish may be a little different when you change from fishing in freshwater to fishing in saltwater, but the way you approach the fish and the baits you feed the fish are very similar.

I was a freshwater-fishing guide and a saltwater-fishing guide, and I found the lures I used in freshwater worked just as well, if not better, in saltwater. We were using freshwater spinner baits for years to catch redfish. We used top-water bass baits, rattling bass baits, freshwater bass worms and tubes to catch bass for many years. I’ve been catching redfish on tube baits ever since Bobby Garland first invented the Gitzit. The tube bait is one of the most-underrated redfish lures on the market today.

Quesion: In a redfish tournament, you have to catch a specific size of redfish, don’t you?

Van Horn: Yes, you do. In most states, you have a minimum length and a maximum length. For instance, in North Carolina, the fish can be from 18- to 27-inches long. But it can’t be longer than 27 inches. If a bass fisherman caught a 28-inch bass, he’d be doing cartwheels and probably have a new world’s record. But if we catch a 28-inch redfish, we’ve got to put it back in the water, and we can’t even enter it into the tournament.

We prefer to sight fish, if at all possible. We can fish down a bank and eliminate redfish by not casting to them, when we know they’re too large or small. Because we’ve had so much time on the water and looked at so many redfish in many-different states, we can tell the difference between the 26-inch redfish and a 27-inch redfish. After looking at so many redfish, we can tell which fish we can catch in a school of redfish. We want to catch the two longest, heaviest redfish we can catch that aren’t more than 27-inches long.

For more information about catching redfish with Strike King lures, check your local TV stations to watch “Flats Class,” TV show, or visit the Flats Class website.

Contents:

• Part 1: The Redfish Magic and the Pure Poison
• Part 2: Fishing the Glass Minnow
• Part 3: Drop Shotting for Redfish – Power Finesse Fishing
• Part 4: The Pitch Bait
• Part 5: Opposites Attract