By Steve Waters

Now that winter is here in South Florida, the vast majority of flats anglers won’t bother fishing for bonefish when a cold front drops the water temperature.

That means Capt. Jorge Valverde has the shallow waters of Biscayne Bay all to himself.

Most fishermen insist that water temperatures have to be in the 70s to catch bonefish on the flats. One of the many fishing experts on the Nautical Ventures Weekly Fisherman radio show, which airs from 6-8 a.m. Saturday on WINZ 940-AM and live-streams on the Nautical Ventures Facebook page, Valverde has caught bonefish in water as cold as 57 degrees.

Valverde, of Cooper City, has caught tailing bonefish — fish that are feeding on flats so shallow that their tails and dorsal fins come out of the water when they dig in the bottom for food with their mouths — in 63-degree water. As he explains, even when it’s cold, the fish still have to eat.

The key, he said, is for the bonefish to get acclimated to the cooler temperatures. When temperatures drop, bonefish initially will go to deeper water and feed there, and Valverde will fish for them in channels. “Then they go back to what they were doing before it got cold,” Valverde explains.

Having fished local flats for bonefish, as well as tarpon and permit, for more than 30 years, that experience has allowed Valverde (www.lowplacesguideservice.com) to come up with a number of unusual tactics for catching bonefish.

For example, Valverde had a client who wanted to catch sharks. So Valverde rigged a spinning outfit with a wire leader and hooked on a live shrimp. Shortly thereafter, a bonefish appeared and, lacking time to re-rig, Valverde told his angler to make a cast. The bonefish ate the shrimp. Most flats fishermen would insist that you need fluorocarbon leaders to get wary bonefish to eat.

Valverde now routinely uses a 20- or 30-pound wire leader instead of split shot when he needs to sink a bait. And since his discovery, he has learned that the old-time bonefish guides often used wire when they needed to add weight. “Split shot makes noise when it hits the water, and fish hear it,” he says. “Wire is much quieter.”

Another commonly held belief is that bonefish feed into the current, so guides pole their skiffs with the current or anchor their boats up-current of where they expect the fish to appear and look for the fish to swim toward them.

“I had always read that bonefish feed upstream into the current,” Valverde says. “Then one day I watched five schools of bonefish swim into the wind.”

Valverde says because bonefish feed into the wind, he positions his boat with the wind at his back, ideally on a slack tide when there’s little current, which he says makes it easier for bonefish to find the bait.

Valverde says because bonefish feed into the wind, he positions his boat with the wind at his back, ideally on a slack tide when there’s little current, which he says makes it easier for bonefish to find the bait.

Another myth is that if you spook a school of bonefish with your boat, you need to move to a new flat because you’ll never see those fish again.

“People think that once you spook bonefish, they’re gone,” Valverde says. “I say, ‘Don’t worry. I’m just going to sit here and wait for them to come back.’ How can a fish live in Biscayne Bay and Florida Bay and not have heard a boat? When bonefish want to be somewhere, you can’t chase them off.”

Sometimes spooked fish can’t leave even if they want to, which Valverde learned by accident. He was running his boat on a flat and ran over a school of fish that he didn’t know was there. He stopped the boat and watched the fish swim to the edge of the flat and then come right back.

Poking around the flat, he discovered the water was so shallow that the fish had only one way to get off the flat, so they had to come back.

“I fish a lot of falling tides,” says Valverde, who knows every nuance of the bonefish flats he fishes. “And often as the water falls off the flat, the fish have one way in and one way out.” When that’s the case, he knows how to approach the fish and where he needs to be.

For more tips from South Florida’s top saltwater and freshwater anglers, listen to The Nautical Ventures Weekly Fisherman radio show every Saturday morning from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. live on 940 WINZ, an iHeart station. You’ll learn where the fish are biting and how to catch them. If you can’t tune in live, the Weekly Fisherman radio podcasts are available through:

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