Everyone has their regional favorite inshore game fish, but there are some target species extraordinary enough to make most anglers’ bucket lists. Some make the cut because of their beauty. Others are valued for their fighting prowess or because they are a challenging adversary to hook up with in the first place. In no particular order, the 10 fish listed here are some of the toughest inshore game fish in the world.
Toughest Saltwater Fish to Catch: Permit
A tall, black dorsal fin and sickle tail of a permit breaking the surface of a shallow flat revs the motor of novice and veteran anglers alike. Their wariness is legendary, and they’ll turn their nose from a lure or fly more times than not.
Hooking up with a permit is a real challenge, and the challenge intensifies once they’re on the line. The fish’s fighting skills include underhanded moves like rubbing their lips against the bottom to chafe your leader and zigzagging across areas laden with sea fans, coral and floating grass to sever your fishing line. They’ll even swim on their side to get past the skinniest of water on their way to the nearest escape route.
As if all that wasn’t enough, the oversize, forked tail and muscular build enables permit to propel at high speeds, and something in their genes tells the fish when to turn broadsided and take full advantage of their wide body to exert maximum resistance against the angler’s pull.
Two primary species of permit are recognized, the Indo-Pacific and the more widespread permit that occurs in the western Atlantic Ocean, from Massachusetts to Brazil, including the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indies. The greatest concentrations of Atlantic permit occur in Belize, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and South Florida. They spawn in deeper water, congregating during spring around wrecks and reefs, where they frequently take on the more aggressive personality of jack crevalle, which makes them easier to catch.
Fishing for Permit
Permit feed mostly along the surf, in shallow patch reefs and on the flats, where they are at their wariest. In these environs, they make the most of their physical gifts and pull out every trick in their bag to avoid capture. It is that high degree of difficulty that makes landing a permit on the flats the quintessential feather in an angler’s cap. The IGFA All-tackle World Record permit, by the way, is exactly 60 pounds. It was caught in Brazil in 2002.
Fly Rod for Permit
Sight casting a fly successfully for permit is among, if not the, most difficult achievement in fly fishing. If you choose to accept the challenge, you’ll want a smooth-casting 9-weight rod with the right balance of power and finesse. Temple Forks Outfitters Mangrove Coast Series is built for the saltwater flats, and a 9-weight is what you want for permit.
Strongest Inshore Game Fish: Tarpon
If you count yourself among the fortunate who have tangled with tarpon, you understand why Megalops atlanticus is considered one of the world’s most exciting and challenging game species. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you’ll need to imagine a fish blessed with the power and stamina of a marlin, the propensity for wild aerial acrobatics of a sailfish, the discerning eyesight of a permit, a rock-hard mouth with very little soft tissue for even the sharpest of hooks to penetrate, and lips as rough as rasps that can easily chafe through a leader.
Add to the equation that tarpon may surpass 200 pounds in weight (the IGFA All-tackle World Record is 286 pounds) and they live upwards of 50 years. These behemoths have weight to throw around and plenty of time to learn to avoid anglers’ treachery and to perfect a few dirty tricks of their own. If you’re still not sure tarpon is the perfect inshore predator, consider also that its anatomy has undergone minimal changes in tens of millions of years, that it can easily adapt to a freshwater environment when needed, and that a special air bladder enables tarpon to gulp air and thrive in waters with little oxygen content.
Fishing for Tarpon
Did we mention tarpon often travel in schools and frequent shallow water, presenting great sight-casting opportunities? Or that they’re opportunistic feeders that eat a wide range of natural baits and are known to strike artificials and even flies?
At certain times of year and in certain places, getting shots at tarpon is easy. Keeping them from throwing the hook or breaking the line is a lot harder. Some experienced tarpon guides say the hook-up to release ratio on large ’poons is 50 percent or less. Use heavy gear to get them in quickly so they have the best chance of survival after release.
Good Tarpon Reels
Soaking live baits is the closest thing you’re going to find to a sure thing when targeting tarpon. To do that, you’re going to want a beefy inshore spinning reel to pitch mullet, pinfish or blue crabs. The Penn Slammer IV is a good option. Start at the 6500 size, moving heavier depending on the size tarpon and amount of structure in the area.
Fastest Fish on the Flats: Bonefish
Five bonefish species are recognized, but only three are known to reach double-digit weights: the roundjaw and sharpjaw (both frequently labeled simply as Indo-Pacific bonefish), which occur in Hawaii, Australia, Seychelle Islands and other warm regions of the Pacific and Indian oceans; and Albula vulpes, the vastly more popular species, probably due to accessibility, that inhabits the western Atlantic and the Caribbean.
Bonefish use their downturned mouth and conical nose to root up prey, and granular teeth in the tongue, upper jaw and throat to grind mollusks and crustaceans. However, the fish’s diet also includes invertebrates and small finfish, and bones adjust their foraging tactics accordingly.
Bonefish Behavior
Bones spend most of their time sifting for morsels in grass, sand or mud flats, often shallow enough for their tail and dorsal to protrude above the surface. Stealth and accurate casting are rewarded with blazing runs that multiply in length and number according to the specimen’s size, which can be substantial in parts of the Bahamas and in South Florida, where the current IGFA All-tackle World Record was set at 16 pounds even.
The silvery scales on a bonefish’s sides reflect the bottom, while its back takes on the coloration of the surroundings, even developing darker stripes to blend with the sea grass. This camouflage enables the fish to remain undetected, hence the nickname “gray ghosts of the flats.”
Sunglasses for Sight Fishing
A sunny day and clear water are beneficial in spotting bonefish. Often anglers are looking for shadows of fish moving across a white sand bottom, rather than the fish themselves. Live shrimp is a good option for getting bit, but fly fishing for bones has become a sport in itself because bonefish are particularly well suited to the technique.
A good pair of polarized sunglasses is a necessity on the flats, both to protect your eyesight and to spot bonefish. Spy+ Optic Overhaul XL are sunglasses that are flush with technical features anglers will appreciate.
America’s Favorite River Runner: Striped Bass
Commonly known as stripers or rockfish in parts of the Mid-Atlantic, striped bass are a long-lived native species (up to 30 years of age) of North America’s Atlantic coast, ranging from the St. Lawrence River to the St. John’s River in Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico to approximately Louisiana. Transplanted stocks have taken hold in California, but stripers are most abundant in coastal waters and estuaries in the northeastern states of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, as well as less Virginia and North Carolina.
Important wintering grounds are located from Cape Henry, Virginia, south to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, but the majority of the coastal migratory stock (70 to 90 percent) originates in the Chesapeake Bay spawning areas, with significant contributions from the spawning grounds of the Hudson and Delaware Rivers. With warming water temperatures in the spring, the mature adults migrate to riverine spawning areas to complete their life cycle, typically spawning from April to June.
Fishing for Stripers
Stripers delight anglers with their aggressive nature, fighting spirit, and their willingness to take spoons, jigs, swim baits, swimming plugs, poppers and flies. Of course, they also fall for a variety of live baits like menhaden (aka bunker), eels, herring, sand eels and mackerel, as well as bait chunks, clams, sandworms and bloodworms.
Waders for Striped Bass
Want to brave the rocks to sling plugs at blitzing striped bass in the surf? You’ll want some heavy-duty waders like Frogg Toggs Steelheaders.
An Opportunistic Brawler: Redfish
Also called red drum, channel bass and spottail bass, redfish are ubiquitous to inshore fishing across the Southeast and Gulf coasts. A native of the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to northeastern Mexico, and the Atlantic coast of the US, as far north as Delaware, redfish spend most of their lives in bays, inlets and passes, coastal rivers, shallow flats and marshes, but larger, sexually mature specimens (known as bull reds) head offshore in schools to spawn. The coast of Louisiana is often heralded as the best redfish fishery in the world.
Though cautious in areas with heavy fishing pressure or boat traffic, reds are opportunistic feeders that search out prey aggressively. The inferior position of their mouth is better suited for foraging on or near the bottom, which causes them to break the surface with their tails in shallow water. But while crabs and shrimp make up a large portion of their diet, so do baitfish like mullet, menhaden, herring, sardines, pilchards, pinfish, pigfish and others.
Fishing for Red Drum
Fishing on the bottom with chunks of blue crab, ladyfish and oily baitfish, suspending live shrimp or crabs under a popping cork, free-lining baitfish near bottom structure, and blind- or sight-casting a range of lures (from jig heads paired with soft plastics to weedless spoons, spinnerbaits, and suspending, shallow-diving and topwater plugs) and flies, take their share of reds in the right circumstances. The IGFA All-tackle World Record is 94 pounds, 2 ounces. It was caught off the coast of North Carolina in 1984.
Lure in a Red
Despite their downturned mouths, redfish will jump all over a well-presented topwater lure. There’s no technique more exciting for fishermen, and a walk the dog-style lure such as the classic Heddon Super Spook Jr. is the ticket to explosive surface strikes.
Florida’s Top Inshore Gamefish: Snook
A total of eight snook species are recognized, but only four — the Pacific black snook, Pacific white snook, the Mexican snook and the common snook — are known to exceed 20 pounds in weight. The latter is the most popular and widespread, ranging from North Carolina to northern Brazil. Pockets of fish reside in southeast Texas and various Caribbean islands, and there is recent evidence of populations expanding into the northern Gulf of Mexico.
The largest snook populations are established along both Florida coasts, Mexico’s Yucatan, and a number of estuaries throughout the Atlantic coast of Central America. Anglers from around the world travel to South Florida to check a big snook off their bucket list.
Notorious for wariness, snook are partial to both natural and man-made structures, from sunken stumps and mangrove roots to rock jetties, dock pilings and bridge abutments. Structure provides cover, and it also creates eddies where snook can wait in ambush for shrimp, crabs, or baitfish like mullet, sardines, herring, pilchards, pinfish, grunts, anchovies and needlefish to float past in the tide.
Displaying astonishing power for their size, snook have a knack for breaking off on submerged obstructions, which makes stopping hooked fish immediately a must. Smaller specimens include jumps in their repertoire of fighting moves, while those over 12 pounds resort to violent head shakes and thrashing to rid themselves of the hook.
Snook Fishing Basics
Proven tactics for snook include live-baiting, trolling swimming plugs along inlets and passes, canals and deep shorelines, and casting jigs, plugs, soft plastics or flies along beaches and around structures located near moving water. The current
IGFA All-tackle World Record is 53 pounds, 10 ounces. It was caught off Costa Rica in 1978.
Gear Up for Snook
Fishing around all that structure, you’ll want to fish high-quality braided line to pull thrashing snook out of the pilings. For smaller fish in more open areas, slinging lures is easier with 10- to 15-pound test. If you’re soaking live baits around canal docks for big females, 20-, 30- and even 50-pound test braided line is in order. Berkley X9 Braid is a solid choice.
The Most Ravenous Predator: Bluefish
A true globetrotter, bluefish is a fast-moving coastal species present in temperate to tropical ocean waters worldwide, except in the eastern Pacific. Blues travel and hunt in schools — often consisting of hundreds of members — along the coast, taking up temporary residence around wrecks, and frequently invading bays and the Intracoastal, even going up coastal rivers, in search of prey.
Their powerful jaws and sharp, serrated teeth serve them well during the ferocious attacks they launch on schooling baitfish of most any kind. So ravenous are their feeding habits that only the fact that blues travel in like-size groups curtails cannibalism, which still takes place when the larger “chopper” blues come across smaller specimens of their same species (often called snapper blues).
Fishing for Bluefish
A variety of natural baits, both live or dead (specially menhaden, herring, pilchards and other oily baitfish species) work well, and so do a number of lures, including spoons, irons, jigs, subsurface and topwater plugs, and soft-plastics, though the latter rarely survive more than a single bluefish strike intact. Angler efforts are usually rewarded with strong runs and wild jumps. In the US, Northeast and mid-Atlantic waters yield trophies exceeding 20 pounds with some frequency. In fact, the IGFA All-tackle World Record, a whopping 31-pound, 12-ounce fish, came from Hatteras, North Carolina in 1972.
Bluefish on Lures
Bluefish will hit a variety of lures, including pretty much any lure when the school gets frenzied. However, all those snapping teeth make short work of plastic and wood. The Kastmaster Lure by Acme Tackle Company is a solid hunk of metal that stands up to abuse. It’s also dense and streamlined, so it casts a long way.
California’s Most Fun Fish: Kelp Bass
Also known as calico bass, kelp bass is a resident of North America’s Pacific. It is prized in California and the northeastern Baja Peninsula and ranges from the Columbia River, Washington, to Magdalena Bay, Baja California. It is usually found in or near kelp beds, around rock jetties and breakwaters, and over reefs or sunken structures, mostly in shallow water, but sometimes as deep as 150 feet.
Catch Calico Bass in the Kelp
This tough and vigorous fighter is an omnivorous feeder that will take most of the local live baits, as well as a variety of lures, especially metal jigs, weighted swim baits, and other soft plastics. The best fishing usually takes place during summer and fall, although kelp bass are available year-round in some areas.
Since kelp bass don’t migrate and they tend to be territorial, they are susceptible to persistent presentations. The larger specimens often come from deeper lairs. The current IGFA All-tackle World Record of 14 pounds, 7 ounces was set in Newport Beach, California, back in 1993.
Weedless Swimbait for Kelp Bass
Fishing through all that kelp, it helps to fish soft-plastic swimbaits that are rigged weedless. The Owner Weighted Beast is a twist-lock, belly-weighted hook that hides the hook point inside the lure so it can swim through the weeds.
An Overlooked Game Fish: Barracuda
There are nine species of barracuda recognized, the Guinean, which reaches weights of 100 pounds, is the largest, followed by the great barracuda, known to exceed 80 pounds. The IGFA All-tackle World Record great barracuda weighed 87 pounds, 3 ounces. It was caught in 2012 at Christmas Island.
Great barracuda is the most widespread of the species, occurring in all tropical seas, except the eastern Pacific. It is found offshore, around wrecks, reefs and underwater pinnacles. Inshore, barracuda hunt around piers, bridges, sand and grass flats, and wherever smaller fish congregate.
Barracuda Fishing
Barracudas possess strong, fang-like teeth, unequal in size and set in sockets in the jaws and the roof of the mouth. These fierce predators rely on surprise and short bursts of speed (up to 27 mph) to overrun their prey, and their diet consists almost completely of fish, and occasionally shrimp and squid. When gorged, larger barracudas are known to herd prey, from baitfish to bonefish, in shallow water, guarding over them until time comes to feed again.
Small to medium size barracudas sometimes gather in schools, but the large ones are mostly loners. In the shallows, they respond to live needlefish, houndfish, pinfish and various other small fish, as well as tube lures and shiny spoons, jigs and plugs retrieved fast enough to occasionally skip on the surface. In deeper water, most fall for fast-trolled lures and baits, as well as free-lined blue runners, small jacks, bluefish, mackerel, bonito and other frisky baitfish.
‘Cudas on the Wire
A wire leader of 12 inches or longer is necessary to land these toothy critters. Some might dare to use a heavy fluorocarbon leader, but wire is safer, especially if you’re throwing expensive lures. AFW Tooth Proof is a good steel leader option.
King of the Pacific Northwest: Chinook Salmon
The largest of the five Pacific salmon species, king salmon, also known as chinook, is a native inhabitant of the northwestern Pacific — from the Ventura River, California to Point Hope, Alaska, plus the Bering Sea, the Okhotsk Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Arctic Ocean.
These fish are anadromous and spend one to eight years in the ocean (the average is three to four years) before returning to the river where they were born to spawn. During their time in ocean waters, their back and top of the head is blue-green or purplish, the sides are silvery, and black spots are sprinkled on the tail and the upper half of the body.
King Salmon Fishing
Chinooks travel and forage in schools of like-size members and tend to relate to offshore reefs and feed on the leeside of underwater drop-offs, pinnacles and ridges of the Continental Shelf, primarily on herring, sea lance and other schooling baitfish, which are easily imitated by a variety of lures and flies.
But once these fish enter freshwater, they undergo radical morphological changes — including much darker coloration — in preparation for spawning. The IGFA All-tackle World Record is 97 pounds, 4 ounces. It was caught from the Kenai River, Alaska in 1985.
Specialized Salmon Rod
With techniques like bobberdogging, back bouncing and hovering, a specialized rod is important when fishing for king salmon. The Shimano Technium B is a medium-heavy rod with outsized power that was purpose built for salmon fishing.
