While most of you are humming that song from “The Lion King”, the circle of life for speckled trout begins in South Carolina marshes when two environmental factors signal mature trout that it’s time to get busy.
Few organisms in the ocean can match the fast life cycle of the dolphin fish, coryphaena hippurus. Dolphin reach sexual maturity at four to five months, where it takes a king mackerel three years to spawn. The world-record dolphin, 87 pounds was believed to be slightly less than five years old. By comparison, the world-record king mackerel, a 93-pound fish, was thought to be closer to 25 years old.
1) Using a thawed, small/medium, high-quality ballyhoo, remove the bait’s eyes with an arrow shaft.
2) Use cutting pliers to remove the bait’s pectoral fins.
May and June offer great opportunities for fishermen who dream of hooking up with a powerhouse, 50-pound cobia just off the beach. But anglers must act fast if they want to get a hookup, because no matter how lazy these fish appear when cruising along the surface, they become less and less catchable every minute a boat is on the scene.
Guide Jot Owens begins seeing cobia off Wrightsville Beach in May, and on a typical day, he will head to the Masonboro Inlet jetties first thing early in the morning and then start running the beach looking for pods of bait and free-swimming cobia. But he can never count on them being in the same place day after day.
Because 2015 was such a fruitful year for North Carolina cobia fishermen, they’ll have a big payback to make in 2016.
When you find a group of bream beds, the fishing can be fast. If you’re catching a mixture of small and big fish, angler Josh Devlin has a tip for targeting bigger ones.
Veteran angler Josh Devlin of Florence said bream beds are easy to find on the Little Pee Dee River, and while he enjoys pulling out one bream after the other, he also makes sure not to fish them too hard.
Bobby Izard carries an arsenal of artificial lures with him when fishing for redbreast sunfish. While some anglers have their favorite lures that they stick to religiously, Izard thinks that’s a mistake.
Blake Michael of Poquoson, Va., knew he was headed to Hatteras earlier this week for the catch of a lifetime, but he didn’t know it would be a doubleheader. Fishing with his buddy, Bryan Nester, this past Thursday, a few days before marrying his “catch-of-a-lifetime” girlfriend, Hailey Hill, Michael landed a 116.2-pound cobia, missing the state record by slightly more than four ounces.
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