Today I had the pleasure of fishing with a pair of brothers, Andrew and Phil, who connected with me through this website. Andrew and his wife own a place in Topsail Beach on the sound and spend a good deal of time fishing and frolicking in the nearby waters. We took their 21’ Sea Hunt out of the inlet shortly after sunrise, headed for Cripple Rock to do some trolling and then some bottom fishing. The seas were a bit confused in the morning with the swells from the south and the wind from the NE but they were quite manageable in the Sea Hunt with Andrew’s capable hand at the helm. As the day went on, the winds died down and it became very calm.
We made a stop at the first set of box cars to jig up some live bait for bottom fishing. The bait was concentrated near the buoy (which is back but now says AR364 instead of AR362) and was a bit skittish but we did manage to get some decent bait. Once we arrived at Cripple rock we began to put out our lines. We went with a spread of a ballyhoo rigged on a Blue Water Candy skirt on the long line and another ballyhoo on a chugger on the medium-long line. On the two down riggers we deployed cigar minnows on Hank Brown rigs.
the last to go out was the chugger and just as Andrew was getting it into position it got nailed by a sailfish. As typically with sails, he hit it with his bill to stun it so Andrew let out line to make it appear to stay in the same place as the boat moved but no hook up, still a great way to get started. Unfortunately it was pretty slow after that with a couple of short strikes. We did manage a new one for me, a Remora swallowed one of our down rigger baits. At first we we thought we had a small (abnout 24”) cobia on the line and even tried to catch his friend that was following. But when we got it to the boat and saw the flat head and grayish body we we realized it wasn’t a cobia. The size of that Remora made us wonder what size shark might be lurking underneath?!?!
In the afternoon we anchored up for some bottom fishing. We never found the grouper but did manage a nice trigger fish and some white grunts. So at least we caught some fresh fish, Andrew’s son really likes fish and was looking forward to some for dinner (glad we didn’t disappoint him).
The fishing was slow but the company was excellent. Andrew and Phil - I really enjoyed getting to know you and thanks again for the trip! Maybe we can go again next week and get some of those Kings that should finally be arriving near the beach.
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