Hooked Up: June 2026

If you had any doubts two weeks ago, you should be convinced now that summer is actually here. It’s getting warm pretty quick. I guess that’s part of the aging thing, but summers feel hotter than normal; I get colder in the winter; and more reclusive by the minute. I was telling a good friend, who I met as a client many moons ago, that very thing the other day and he said, “Ahhh…MANopause is getting to you.” I ‘bout fell out of the boat laughing at his play on words. Obviously it made an impression, because here I am telling y’all about our laugh at my expense. MANopause…HA!

For me, June is probably the most fun month of the warm weather season. Although the focus of my charters is always pursuing the largest trout available, it’s sometimes just fun to get a lot of bites. There is nothing more gratifying than chasing the giants and having a client catch one or three. But right next to that is the father who brings a youngster and we get them into a trout on every cast situation along a drop-off. The excitement, body language, and comic outbursts that only a kid can come up with makes for a fun day for this captain. This is what June has become for me and what I look forward to every year…getting a kid started on this lifelong sport versus a video game or having a phone in hand like another appendage.

June brings everything together in the sense that the bay is full of new baitfish that have now rode in on the equinox tides, with the gamefish in tow. Lots of action will fulfill anyone’s connection to the outdoors, but what if you can have both – action and trophy quality? Well, you can right now!

I remember eight or ten years back, I had my group on a little sand flat, burning big paddle tails across it and just getting blasted about every fifth cast. The fish were small to five pounders or so. You never knew which bite was going to be one or the other, so you set the hook like you were pulling the starter rope on a forty-year-old lawn mower, anticipating the fish that might double that five pounder in weight.

Well, about three hundred yards from us was another group wading on the same kind of structure. I was keeping an eye on them because the group was made up of some good buddies that were just out fun fishing. Saying that, their number included some really salty dudes that were no strangers to catching big trout, and throwing big hardware for such a bite.

Now, my group was having a blast and catching steadily, but I couldn’t help but notice my buddies were not getting the bites we were. I took an angle towards them to intersect with the guy closest to me. As we came together he acknowledged that we were blasting the trout, and I wanted to let him know how we were doing it so they could get in on the aggressive bite. We played show and tell for a minute and I made a comment about the couple of small trout he had on his stringer for dinner. What I didn’t see, or couldn’t see, was the trout over nine pounds that was anchoring his float to the bottom. Whoa! It was a giant June fish that would eventually win the STAR Tourney for him that year. Turns out he got just what he was looking for. Opting for fewer bites for that one big one. Respect that!

Baffin Bay is a very unique place, as most coastal fisherman know. At just about any given moment or time of the year, a career-best trout can come seemingly out of nowhere. Certain times of year, water temps, and atmospheric considerations can concentrate the big ones, but June is the month where you can kind of have it all – a mixed bag of lots of bites, solid specimens, and occasional giants. If you are on the fence about getting a kid into wading, taking someone that’s been out of the game for a while and want to get them back into it, or just have a day for yourself of getting that Waterloo folded in half, now is the time to dust off that garage-kept Haynie or jump into mine.

Maybe you will rediscover why you fell in love with chasing speckled trout. Reach out to me and we can make it happen.

Remember the Buffalo,

Capt David Rowsey