Southeast Georgia Fishing Reports With Capt. Bert Deener – May 10, 2024

Sean Tarpley caught this big redbreast and a bunch more on Saturday while fishing the upper Satilla basin. A black/chartreuse Satilla Spin was the most productive lure.

The annual Satilla Riverkeeper fishing tournament is still going on through May 12. Check out details in the Satilla River section below. Fishing has been very good all over the place, so take your pick this weekend. There is a strong cold front coming just in time for the weekend, so choose your species carefully (crappie are typically fickle behind a cold front).

Alapaha River: Stan Rhodes and David McGlamry fished the river on Friday and had a great catch of fish. They kept 44 and caught a bunch more than that. About half their fish were bluegill and half redbreast with a few warmouth and shellcracker mixed in the catch. Stan said the water was still up and cool, but they had some really nice fish. Most of their fish ate crawfish Satilla Spins, but they caught a few on crickets and crawfish.

Jamie Hodge caught this giant shellcracker in the backwaters of the Altamaha River this week. It ate a pink worm fished on the bottom.

Altamaha River: The river fishing is about to break wide open once it drops a little more. Jamie Hodge sent me a photo of a bunch of big bluegill he caught in the backwaters this week. He also caught some big shellcracker on pink worms.

Satilla River: The annual Satilla Riverkeeper fishing tournament will continue through May 12. There have been some good fish caught, but all categories are still beatable. Remember that all kids who enter the tournament will be entered into a drawing for a $250 gift certificate from Satilla Feed and Outdoors, so get your kids signed up! For details, check out the Satilla River Facebook page.

I’ve gotten reports of some good catches this week, mostly from the upper reaches and tributaries. Ed Zmarzly and Sean Tarpley floated the upper reaches on Saturday and whacked the redbreasts. It was still a little high, but they caught 50 fish—mostly redbreasts. They only had one dink, and everything else was 7 inches or bigger. Satilla Spins (black/chartreuse was one of their top colors) fooled their fish. Sean is hooked on river fishing!

A Blackshear angler walked the small blackwater creeks in the upper Satilla basin after work this week and caught a couple dozen fliers up to seven inches and several other species of panfish with a pink sally.

Okefenokee Swamp: I fished the east side on Wednesday morning and did well for bowfin. I checked a couple of warmouth spots and did not catch any in a half hour. Then I started fishing for big fish. I started casting and was not getting it done, so I started trolling. That was the ticket, as I ended up catching 14 bowfin during the next two hours. My biggest three fish were 8-lbs. and two weighed 7-lbs., 13-ozs. Late in the trip, a couple of fish ate baits that were casted. All of them hit these colors—either jackfish (that was the best), red/white, lemon-lime and black/chartreuse-chartreuse blade. 

The warmouth bite has not really picked up as fast as I thought it would. From reports, you can expect to catch about a dozen warmouth in a four-hour trip. Buck Johnson had the best warmouth report I received this week. He pitched jigs for about four hours and caught 20 warmouth and had several others fall off while swinging them in the boat, or he just didn’t get a good hook-set in them. He said they were biting kind of finicky. The most recent water level (Folkston side) was 121.16 feet.   

Local Ponds: The young trio of Tripp, Charlotte and Waylon put it on the fish in their pond this week when Tripp wasn’t turkey hunting with his dad. Tripp, 7, got his second gobbler this Saturday, so he tagged out in his first season.

They fooled lots of bass, bluegill and shellcracker over the weekend with black/chartreuse Bert’s Bugs. The fish wouldn’t touch dad’s white bug but ate up the kids’ black/chartreuse models.

Chris O’Berry and his children have been fishing their pond with Zombi Eye jig heads (black-green eye) and small Keitech swimbaits and have been killing the bluegill!

Jimmy Zinker caught a 7-lb., 12-oz. bass Monday night on a jitterbug. That was his biggest bass, but he had a couple of bowfin almost that big that whacked his buzzbaits. He said that in 50-plus years of fishing that he’s not caught bowfin on buzzbaits… until this week. He night fishes for trophy bass all summer long and fishes his custom jitterbugs and Trophy Bass Buzzbaits (designed by Pat Cullen) almost exclusively at night.

Joshua Barber has been putting his new driver’s license to good use, fishing local ponds Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. On Tuesday, he caught 15 bass and two bowfin, mostly on live minnows and shiners, but he had a couple on a black/blue Speed Worm. Wednesday afternoon he fooled seven bass, two bowfin and three crappie.

Chad Lee has the best lunch breaks in the world. He fishes ponds where he works and catches bass after choking down a sandwich (knowing him, he might just skip lunch to go fishing). This week he caught 12 bass up to 2 pounds during his lunch breaks. All of them ate Rat-L-traps.

Scott Smith caught his personal best 19 1/2-inch seatrout this week in the Brunswick area while casting a Tennessee-shad Keitech swimbait rigged on a Zombi Eye jig head.

Saltwater (GA Coast): Scott Smith and a buddy fished the coast near Brunswick this week, and Scott broke his personal-best trout with a 19 1/2-incher. It ate a Tennessee-shad Keitech rigged on a Zombi Eye jig head. They also caught some flounder and whiting during the trip. While whiting fishing, they also pulled on some big sharks that gave their whiting gear all it could handle.

Capt. Greg Hildreth took Christine and Emma, of St. Simons Island, on Wednesday, and they caught some nice trout and bull redfish on live shrimp under Harper Super Striker Floats. Tommy Sweeney fished the Brunswick area this week and caught a few nice keeper trout and a 20-inch keeper redfish by fishing live shrimp under a Harper Super Striker Float. The key was to fish around shells once the ebb tide slowed down. The strong winds and tide had the water muddy around high tide.

Wat-a-melon Bait and Tackle in Brunswick is open Friday through Sunday from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. each week. They have plenty of lively shrimp and fiddler crabs and also have live worms and crickets for freshwater. They’re on Highway 303 just north of Highway 82. For the latest information, contact them at 912.223-1379.

First quarter moon is May 15. To monitor all the Georgia river levels, visit the USGS website. For the latest marine forecast, check out www.weather.gov/jax/.

River gages on May 9 were:

Clyo on the Savannah River – 7.9 feet and rising
Abbeville on the Ocmulgee – 4.3 feet and falling
Doctortown on the Altamaha – 7.7 feet and rising
Waycross on the Satilla – 8.4 feet and falling
Atkinson on the Satilla – 6.7 feet and falling
Statenville on the Alapaha – 4.6 feet and falling
Macclenny on the St Marys – 3.4 feet and falling
Fargo on the Suwannee – 9.0 feet and falling

Capt. Bert Deener guides fishing trips in the Okefenokee Swamp and other southeast Georgia systems and makes a variety of both fresh and saltwater fishing lures. Check his lures out at Bert’s Jigs and Things on Facebook. For a copy of his latest catalog, call him at 912.288.3022 or email him at [email protected].