Seatrout, where, when and how in Denmark

By Thomas Samuelsen

How to find your own seatrout hotspot? To select the right place where you might could have success, depends on several factors:

• Time of the year
• Temperature of the water
• The weather
• Time of the day

The seatrout are in the sea to feed and grow, therefore they will spend time to find food. What does a seatrout eat? Well, it depends most of the time on the size of the seatrout. Smaller seatrout, up to 1-1½ kg primarily eat shrimps, small crabs and small fish as stickleback, sandeel and small herrings. To pick a good spot you have to find a place where the seabed has the best living conditions for shrimps, small crabs and small fish like stickleback, sandeel and small herrings.

Good living conditions for seatrout food are lots of seaweed, small and large stones and a few spots of sand. A useful tool to pick a good spot is homepages as Google earth. From above the seabed should look like a leopard skin; a lot of seaweed with a few shiny spots with sand.

Just a little further out you can see the 'leopard skin'.

Larger seatrout will normally not do with small food objects. They prefer bigger fish such as herrings and sandeels and sometimes squid. But again there are no rules without exceptions. Big seatrout sometimes hunts down larger shrimps and crabs in shallow water as well.

90% Of my time fishing for seatrout I use class 6 equipment with an intermediate line, as the Glider from Shakespeare. It breaks the surface fast and gives good contact to the fly. Furthermore the Glider has fine casting skills and cuts nice through the air. I adjust the depth of the flies either with a sinking polyleader and fluorocarbon and/or loaded flies.

Class 6 equipment is ok.

In the summertime and when I want to fish the fly high, I use monofil line for the leader and tippet. If the wind speed exceeds 6-8 m/s I will change to class 8 equipment. Only if the fishing is taking place in very deep water in the cold season or from a boat or belly boat I will use a sinking line type 2-3 and heavy loaded flies.

In the winter season the seatrout prefer brackish water because of the low temperature and only the bigger seatrout are able to withstand the higher salt level in the open cold waters. There the seatrout prefer places with good current from the tide, because the water in the deep is a little warmer than the water near the coast line.

A little warmer than the water near the coast line,

That means a good winter spot for bigger seatrout, you must have deep water close to shore and a good current. But just because you find such place there are no guaranties that you will find seatrout. It is easier to find the smaller seatrout on the bottom of the fjords where the water is brackish and shallow, and on a sunny day the temperature could rise just a degree or two.

A temperature increase can activate the seatrout food suddenly and the seatrout knows that. They get more active and start to search for food. In cold conditions the seatrout react slower than in the preferred temperature about 10°C and the take is usually slower than normal. The strike often comes when the fly starts to move again.

The strike often comes when the fly starts to move again.

In the cold water the seatrout prefers smaller food objects and a good fly could be a hot pink or orange shrimp with flash. This color can often get attention and a strike is close. Sometimes the seatrout can just nibble to the fly and you will feel some small pushes in the rod, speed up the retrieve and then make a break and the seatrout can’t resist the fly and strikes 9 out of 10 times.

If there is an ice-winter, with ice on the sea, you can expect very good fishing. If you hit the spot and time exactly, when the ice breaks up and floats away by the wind. The seatrout gets suddenly active and looks for prey such as shrimps, lug worms and small fish.

Seatrout love them...

Spring time means for me; main fishing time for seatrout. The sun is slowly warming up the water and life of the prey explodes. The shallow water becomes a big breadbasket for the seatrout and it’s getting very active. Often the seatrout don’t hesitate to take the fly whatever it looks like. This time of the year the seatrout is not picky about the food.

It has been cold and those seatrout that have spawned in the rivers in the winter have now returned to the sea and they are hungry. Please, if you catch a fallen seatrout in poor condition, put him carefully back in the water again. A fallen seatrout isn’t worth eating anyway! A fallen seatrout is very slim, dull and dark in color and the tailfin could have some damage on the edge from digging in the gravel in the river.

Seatrout in poor condition. Put them back carefully.

Sometimes if the seatrout is swimming around a huge quantity of one single type of prey will be eaten by them. For an example shrimps, the seatrout can be selective and they will only focus on shrimps. This behavior can also be seen when lug worms spawns in the spring.

The seatrout only eats lug worms and stops first when it has filled the belly with lug worms. The spawn of the lug worms only happens in the days and nights up to and just after full moon and when the water temperature is about 6-8° C in April. The time after this enormous feast the seatrout becomes a more normal behavior and it takes all kind of imitations.

Completely eaten, it doesn't matter that much.

In the summer time when the water temperature rises to 15-20° C, the seatrout travels to deeper and cooler water and is typical hunting small herring out in the deep. When the night falls and temperature drops a few degrees the seatrout may come back in to shallow water to look for fry and other smaller prey.

Therefore the best fishing time is in the night and in the sunrise. I prefer to use a floating line in the summer season because of the high growing seaweed and in the dark hours I want to have the fly to fish just under the surface. I use bigger, black flies and even sometimes a black cigar or popper approx 4-6 cm.

Therefore the best fishing time is in the night and in the sunrise.

Black or dark colors are very visible into the light summer night sky. When the fly is fishing high in the water and often the seatrout is swimming close to the seabed, the fly becomes an easy target for the seatrout and it takes the fly aggressively hard in a turn.

You can fish for seatrout in the sunlight but it’s difficult. The seatrout seems to fear the strong bright light and hides in deeper, cooler water and keep in low activity in the seaweed. The right gear for this could be sinking line and quite big herring imitations up to 10-12 cm, which the seatrout hardly ever can’t withstand. A small kind of disk in front of the fly gives extra movements and the fly becomes an attractive mouthful for the seatrout.

Flies with a disc in front.

Autumn is sometimes a special and difficult time to catch seatrout, thus they have been eating a lot in the summer time and most of the seatrout are traveling to the river, where they were born several years ago, to secure the survival of their kind. Traveling seatrout don’t have that much appetite and they nearly only have to find their spawning river in the mind.

Small flies imitating shrimps, crabs with a red or orange strike point can outwit a seatrout once in a while. Normally I practice the same fishing as in the winter time, but the line retrieve is quite fast to provoke a strike. Smaller flies in hot colors with fast retrieve can also give success.

Smaller flies in hot colors with fast retrieve can also give success.

For the moment the water around Denmark is below 0° C and the shallow fjords have a cover of ice, so the seatrout fishing is almost on standby. There are some ‘hot spots’ anyway, where power plants and factories let out cooling water from the turbines or production, but it’s like cheating and often you cannot get access on registered ground and close enough to reach those ‘hot spots’.

Tight lines and wet flies at the water.

Thomas Samuelsen

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