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How to catch Sheepshead
Sheepshead feed in 48–74°F water and bite best at 54–66°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 20 waters; in October they are at their peak in The Southern Outer Banks & Cape Fear.
About
The convict fish: black bars and a mouth full of human-looking teeth for crushing barnacles and crabs. Lives on pilings, jetties and reefs, and spawns on the nearshore structure in late winter.
How to fish it
Tight to the structure — the bait touching the piling — with a small strong hook and just enough weight. The bite is a tap; set on the second one. Scrape the pilings to chum.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Fiddler crabsA #1 hook through the back corner of the shell, dropped tight to the piling — the sheepshead bait.
Live shrimpUnder a popping cork or free-lined, hooked under the horn on a #1 to 2/0 circle hook; on a jig head for the bottom. The universal inshore bait.
Sand fleas (mole crabs)On a small circle hook or a pompano rig, digger-end first — the pompano and whiting bait.
Grass shrimpTwo or three on a #6 hook under a small cork — the bream, crappie, sheepshead and mangrove snapper bait nobody sells.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
not confirmed hereMinimum size and bag limit apply; confirm the current numbers at MyFWC.
The current rule →Where it is, month by month
Sheepshead are structure fish from the Chesapeake to Texas, and their year turns around one event: the late-winter spawn. In January they gather on the deep structure at the lower end of the bays — bridges, jetties, deep docks — and in February and March they move to the nearshore reefs and pass jetties to spawn, several times a season, triggered by water temperature (later the farther north you go, into April in the Carolinas). After the spawn they spread back inshore, and in the Chesapeake and Carolina waters summer is actually sheepshead season around bridge tunnels and wrecks. Fiddler crabs, a small strong hook, and set on the second tap.