North River offers amazing red drum and speckled trout bites during November.
The watery ring the bait and float created when they lightly splashed into the protected water at the mouth of the small creek off the North River had spread just a few feet when the bobber unceremoniously disappeared.
With reactions honed by years of fishing, Captain Noah Lynk of Harkers Island set the hook in an eyeblink and the afternoon’s silence was interrupted by the whirring sound of the small spinning reel giving line to a hooked and desperately fleeing red drum.
It was — and always will be — a happy sound to any angler.
“Wow, that didn’t take long,” said the excited Lynk as he worked to control the feisty redfish.
“I’ve been catching trout and drum in here for several weeks, and it’s been pretty good at times, but that might be the fastest we’ve ever had one on. The action here has been so good I’ve been wondering when it will slow or stop, but it looks like they might be biting at least one more day.”
Lynk worked the puppy drum to the boat where he cradled it and lifted it from the water to remove the hook. As he held it, he admired its copper back, double spots and the trailing blue edge of its tail.
Lynk said many people don’t appreciate puppy drum until they spend a few hours catching them and realize how rugged yet attractive they are.
Several casts and several drum later, it was obvious the reds were holding at the mouth of the small creek. Most of these fish were at the bottom end of the slot for drum and would have been keepers — if we had wanted two for dinner. However, fortunately for the drum, this wasn’t a “keeper” trip, just a fun way to stretch lines during a mild November afternoon.
“If the drum are holding right up in the mouth there, I’m going to cast down the bank a ways and see if I can catch a (spotted sea)trout,” Lynk said after catching several drum and as he was slipping another shrimp on his hook.
“There’ve been some in here and some of them have been right nice. I might consider taking a trout home for dinner if I catch the right one.”
Lynk (of Noah’s Ark Fishing Charters, www.noahsarkfishingcharters.com, 252-204-3139 or 252-342-6911) was using a popping cork rig with a red No. 4 octopus-style Gamakatsu hook, suspended about 18 inches below the cork. It’s Lynk’s favorite hook for most inshore species, and he attaches it to the line with a small loop, rather than snelling it as many fishermen do.
To allow quickly changing for fishing at the bottom, Lynk was using a Shur-Strike 4-inch weighted and slotted popping cork. This float can be quickly and easily slipped onto the line by simply sliding the line through the slot and pinning it at the desired location with the plastic stick included with the float. The bait can be fished simply with a hook — or a split shot can be added to help keep the bait down.
Lynk’s cast landed about 50 feet away and about a foot from the marsh grass covered bank. He waited a while, then lowered his rod tip to near the water, eased the slack out of the line, leaned the cork over parallel to the water and popped it with a quick flip of his wrist.
The concave top of the popping cork filled with water and made a “sploosh” sound as it moved forward about a foot then stood upright as Lynk relaxed the line.
He repeated the popping motion several times, then the cork disappeared beneath the surface just after returning upright following a pop. This fish headed down the bank a few yards then turned toward the middle of the larger creek where we were anchored.
Making a quick roll on the surface, it flashed more silver than red.
“I believe this might be a trout,” Lynk said. “Drum will sometimes come out into open water, but they usually like to stay close to the bank to find a hole in the grass to run into or something to go around and try to break you off.”
Because of small hooks, Lynk was forced to use a light drag. A minute or so of tussling with the fish passed before he got the fish close enough to the boat to identify. When we could see clearly, it was indeed a speckled trout. It wasn’t huge by any means, but would have been a keeper, had we been so inclined.
Live trout have some iridescent red and emerald green colors on their upper backs, in addition to the drab green most anglers see. These colors are subtle and not always present but tend to be more visible when trout are caught from cooler water.
This speck struggled a little and flashed this color in the November sun as Lynk cradled and lifted him to remove the hook. It was impressive — and a nice trout — but after we took a few pictures, Lynk slipped the pretty trout into the water, and we watched it swim away.
Following Lynk’s lead and advice, I lofted a struggling shrimp to about where his cork disappeared. After just a couple of pops of my cork, I was rewarded with a trout strike.
We caught a few trout and released them before the bite slowed. A cast toward the small creek mouth found the puppy drum still feeding.
Pulling out more rods with grubs and MirrOlures, we found the drum weren’t particular, just hungry, and readily attacked these lures.
At Lynk’s suggestion, we switched to a pair of rods with bare jigheads, slipped some minnows on the hooks and cast toward the center of the larger creek. After letting the minnows sit a minute or so, we began slowly winding, barely creeping the baits toward the boat. After a few feet of retrieving his minnow, Lynk noted he was hooked up with another drum. A few feet farther, and my bait began acting nervous.
Expecting a drum to slam my frantic minnow and run, I was not quite prepared for the chomp, chomp sensation that was shooting up the Berkley Fireline. In just a few seconds there was a sensation of weight at the end of the line and I jerked sharply to set the hook.
The stubborn fish hunkered down and the struggle wasn’t the fight I expected. This fish hadn’t run but was definitely pulling back with a purpose.
After about a minute a dark and somewhat round shape slowly grew visible in the murky water. Fearing it would materialize into a skate, I wasn’t expecting a flounder. Once I was able to bring the flatfish to Lynk, who was waiting with the landing net, I’d completed an inshore slam and in November.
We fished this spot a while longer and were having a ball with the reds, but we hadn’t caught another trout or flounder. It was a lot of fun, but our expectations for continuing the variety of hits faded quickly.
“It looks like this has become just a drum bite,” Lynk said, almost as if he were reading my mind. “I don’t have a problem with that, but I came back here to catch a variety.
“If we are going to be catching just drum, I have a hole that’s pretty much on the way back and usually holds some larger fish. I’ve got a couple of more trout holes, too, but it’s so late, we’ll use up most of the rest of our time going to and from (these spots).”
After a short discussion, we decided to see if the larger drum were fired up as well.
Leaving that first spot, I noticed a bunch of places where I could see oyster rocks just below the surface and mentioned it to Lynk. He said the tide had fallen some since we came in and we might bump a time or two going to this next spot, but his 22-foot Bay Rider had a shallow-enough draft we wouldn’t have any problems getting in and out.
While I continued to see clumps of oysters just below the surface, Lynk missed all of them. We soon arrived at an indentation in the bank where a large creek turned off of the main creek. Easing up to the bank, he shoved a Harkers Island version of a Cajun Anchor into the edge of the bank and tied us up to it.
“There’s a pretty nice oyster rock that runs off that point back there and comes up to about here,” Lynk said, pointing off our starboard and a little astern. “As the tide begins coming in, it’ll make a little eddy then push bait across the end.
“We’ll go back to the popping corks and cast out near the end and let the tide push our baits across. I believe you’ll see some bigger drum here.”
We had a few live baits andbegan fishing with them. It took a half dozen or so casts to find exactly where the fish were and how our baits needed to drift to them, but it wasn’t long before the bite began again.
Once we found them, these red drum were definitely larger, running from upper slot to just longer (27 inches in length) than slot size. Even better, they were biting like they hadn’t eaten in weeks. It was as close to a-fish-every-cast as I can remember.
Soon we had run out of live baits and raided Lynk’s tackle box. The drum continued to nail anything and everything we threw at them.
After about an hour of non-stop action, we began looking deep in the tackle box, finding lures and colors he had stopped using because of lack of confidence; that didn’t matter to this school of reds. These fish were ravenous and incredibly aggressive. It was truly “one of those days.”
At this second spot, we caught about a half dozen drum that had a red fungus growing on their scales just behind their heads and on their sides, and several of them also had some light deformities that were like they had been pinched just behind their head and gills. The deformities resembled a plant that tried to grow around a steadying rope or wire that had been put on when it was smaller. My first thought was these fish had been caught by something.
Lynk said they were drum that had been released or had escaped from gill nets. He said the pinched look was caused by a net biting into them; the fungus had formed where the net had rubbed off their protective slime coatings.
I sent a couple of pictures of these fish to Dr. Fred Scharf at the UNCW Department of Biology and Marine Biology and, after examining them, he said his students had encountered similar markings in their sampling programs and confirmed the fish had probably survived an encounter with a gill net.
Scharf said the fungus from removal of the slime was typically more pronounced in the warmer water of the summer and less prominent on fish caught when the water was cool to cold. He said red drum are a hardy fish with a high probability of surviving net abuse that would kill lesser fish.
As we motored back to the marina in the final glow of the setting sun, Lynk admitted this had been one of his best days of fishing. That fact was magnified as we discussed this outing actually being “Plan B” for our afternoon trip that became necessary when the wind was blowing too hard to go to a pre-planned spot near Cape Lookout.
If this was “Plan B,” it was good we couldn’t do the original plan. This fishing trip would be difficult to equal and almost impossible to surpass.
If it had been any better, I don’t know that I would even begin to try to exceed it. We caught (and released) all the drum we wanted, a good number of speckled trout, a nice flounder and a few nuisance fish such as bluefish and pinfish. It was a day to remember.
However, if you’d like to try to better this day, Lynk attempts it daily. He said November is an excellent month to try.
If you give him a call, set your date and the original plan doesn’t work out, ask him to go to “Plan B.” It works pretty well too.
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