Also known as Southern Fluke, Mud Flounder, Halibut (Gulf slang), Doormat, Flatfish. Bait, technique, tide windows, and where the bite is on right now.
Southern Flounder — The ambush flatfish that buries on the edge and waits. Also called Southern Fluke, Mud Flounder, Halibut (Gulf slang), Doormat, Flatfish.
Southern Flounder is also known as: Southern Fluke, Mud Flounder, Halibut (Gulf slang), Doormat, Flatfish. The ambush flatfish that buries on the edge and waits.
Regional names can confuse anglers and cause misidentification. The table of common names below covers the most-used alternatives across Australia, New Zealand and the US:
Key to correct identification: check the regulations-authority species sheet for your state or territory before keeping any fish — minimum legal sizes, bag limits and identification guides are published by each fisheries department and are the authoritative source.
Hero spots in our coverage where Southern Flounder is in season for June. Click through for the live forecast.
Out of season across our covered spots in June.
Find the bait first and the flounder will be on the edge of it. These are ambush predators that bury in sand or soft mud and wait for current to push food past, so you fish ambush points, not open water: the down-current lip of an oyster bar, the mouth of a marsh drain dumping into a creek, dock and bridge pilings, channel edges, and the sand-to-mud transition just inside an inlet. Drift or slow-troll a live mud minnow or finger mullet on a Carolina rig right along the bottom, keeping the sinker ticking — when a flounder eats, you feel weight and a "thump," then you drop the rod tip, give it a slow three-count to turn the bait, and come tight rather than swinging on the first bump. For artificials, a Gulp Swimming Mullet on a light jighead worked with a slow drag-and-pause along a depth change is deadly; let it sit on the bottom between hops because the strike usually comes when it's dead-still. Classic grounds include the surf and inlets of the Carolina coast (Cape Lookout, the Cape Fear and Masonboro inlets), Georgia and the ICW around the Golden Isles, the Louisiana marsh out of Venice and Lafitte, and the Texas passes — Sabine, Galveston, and the bay edges out of POC and Port Aransas during the fall run. Gigging is the other half of this fishery: on a calm night over a falling tide you wade or pole a flat-bottom skiff across shallow sand with a bright light, looking for the buried outline, and gig them where they lie.
Current is everything for flounder — a dead slack tide usually means a dead bite. The best windows are the moving water on either side of a tide change, and most flounder anglers favor the last of the falling tide through the first of the incoming, when bait gets flushed out of the marsh grass and drains and the flounder stack on the down-current ambush edges to intercept it. Around inlets and passes the falling tide is prime because it concentrates everything funneling out toward the ocean. Position your drift so the bait moves with the current past the structure, not against it. In the fall run, that falling tide out of the inlet is also literally the migration lane — the fish are dropping out to spawn — which is why an outgoing tide on an inlet edge in October can be the single best flounder bite of the year.
Moon matters less directly for flounder than the tidal current it drives. The honest read is that the spring tides around the new and full moon move more water harder and faster, which fires up the feed on the ambush edges and, in fall, accelerates the run out the inlets — so a strong moon phase is good less because of "moon" and more because of the bigger tide swing it creates. Night giggers do prefer the darker nights around the new moon, when their light isn't competing with bright moonlight and buried fish show up better. If you're picking a day, weight the tide and the wind far more heavily than the lunar phase.
Southern flounder is actively managed and the rules have tightened a lot in recent years, so treat this as a check-before-you-go species. Most Southeast and Gulf states set their own state-waters bag and size limits and, increasingly, a closed or shortened fall season to protect the spawning migration — North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas and others have all changed flounder seasons and limits recently, and they're reviewed and reset annually. Federal/offshore rules can differ from state-waters rules. Because flounder regulations now change frequently and vary by state, confirm the current bag limit, minimum size, and open season with your state wildlife or marine fisheries agency before keeping any fish.
US state size & bag limits for Southern Flounder: FL · TX · NC · SC · GA · AL · LA
Olli-Mikael Vaittinen has fished his whole life. Fifteen years of fly fishing, guiding seasons on Norway's Lakselva — his favourite Atlantic salmon river — and a blue marlin landed in Vava'u, Tonga. Founder of Fishare — the app that puts the data behind the decisions every angler makes on the water.
Fishare tracks your home spots and pings you when the next 3-hour peak window opens. Log catches and blanks to teach the model your local patterns. Free forever for everyone who joins now.
Open Fishare