60-foot Kings

When November arrives at the N.C. coast, anglers find king mackerel ready to smoke reels at the 10-fathom curve.

The number “60” is a magical one, and not just because Babe Ruth made it famous in 1927.

Most of the guys who fish seriously for king mackerel at the east side of Cape Fear and the Frying Pan Shoals know when it comes to catching lots of fish and a good showing of smokers, “60” is the place you start in the fall — 60-feet deep.The 60-foot — or 10-fathom — curve is like no curve ball the Babe hit into the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. It’s an imaginary line on charts or maps that’s an inch or two east of the beach, depending upon your map’s scale. But it’s much more than that. In the fall, it attracts fish like a magnet draws iron filings.

“In October you’ll get a temperature break starting out along the 60-foot line, and it will get stacked up with kings,” said Capt. Rod Bierstedt, who runs Onmyway Charters with his son, Capt. Barry Bierstedt, out of Dockside Marina in Wrightsville Beach.

“If you look at a chart, you find that the 60-foot line matches up with hard bottom and artificial reefs up and down the coast. That makes it an extremely productive place to start off, all the way from Topsail to the shoals.

“You’ve got about 35 miles of perfect structure, a perfect edge, and (the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries) just happened to put three artificial reefs in those areas. It’s just a really hot king mackerel fishery.”

For most fishermen with seaworthy center consoles, the 60-foot curve meanders along the coast about 10 miles off the beach — a good 30-minute run from places like Masonboro Inlet and Carolina Beach Inlet. The need to navigate for hours to find fish doesn’t exist because there are plenty between the beach and the 60-foot curve, productive community holes — Dallas Rock, 8-mile boxcars, 10-mile rock, 10-mile boxcars, the Dredge Wreck, 30-30, the Cabbage Patch, the Cucumber — that show up on almost every map.

Just take your pick, make a run and drop baits in the water. If that seems easy, well, it almost is.

The Bierstedts figured out a while back the 60-foot curve was special, particularly during the fall when falling water temperatures start to push baitfish and gamefish into different areas and, best of all, forced them to gang up at certain areas.

Unlike the summer months when a king angler may run from spot to spot, lucky to get a strike at each piece of productive bottom, a day’s trip this month can be finished at one spot after a couple of hours.

“Kings will actually congregate in the fall; they’re spread out during the summer, but in the fall you can have multiple strikes in an area,” said Barry Bierstedt, a student at UNC-Wilmington who got his captain’s license at a ridiculously young age. “If you catch one at a spot in the fall, you should catch more.”

“It’s not unusual,” Rod Bierstedt said, “to have three or four lines hit at one time, once you get the first one on in an area. We’ve had some charters where you limit out with 20-pound fish in two hours.”

The action usually cranks up during October and can last into early December, or as long as the surface water temperature doesn’t drop drastically below 68 degrees.

“Those ledges and rocks around the 60-foot area will get good as soon as the water starts to cool down, and you can catch kings as long as you’ve got 68-degree water,” Rod Bierstedt said. “Then you just have to keep moving out with them, to WR-4 all the way to Frying Pan Tower and to the ledges that are 30 to 35 miles out. You wind up fishing in the winter about 48 miles out.”

Why is the 60-foot line so productive? It’s a combination of things, including a lot of good ledges and dropoffs around that particular depth, plus the presence of so much good live bottom — rocky, hard-bottom reefs that attract baitfish. Throw in the temperature break line that develops at that depth and, voila, instant kings.

“The good stuff starts off Topsail with real good ledges and live bottom,” Rod Bierstedt said. “The first thing you do is hit the 8-mile boxcars (AR 362), then Dallas Rock, the 10-mile rock, the 10-mile boxcars (AR 376), the Dredge Wreck (AR 382) and the ledges south of it, the 30/30, all the way down to the shoals, to the Cabbage Patch and the Cucumber, which are in 45 feet of water.

“There are a bunch of ledges just north and south of the dredge; you’ve got a whole fishery right there — eight to 10 different places to fish. The dredge is 14 miles from Masonboro Inlet, and straight south of the dredge, you’ve got a couple of good ledges within two to 2 1/2 miles.

“On the way in, you can fish the 5-Mile boxcars (AR 372), which are in 45 to 48 feet of water. They can be anywhere from the beach all the way out to that 60-foot range. There is a lot of live bottom inshore of the 20-Mile boxcars, and they’re 10 miles from either (Carolina Beach or Masonboro) inlet.

“Day-in and day-out, Carolina Beach Inlet is better than Masonboro Inlet. Carolina Beach has got all the Cape Fear River stuff running out, whereas Wrightsville Beach gets clean water. Masonboro is probably a better inlet for flounder and puppy drum, but Carolina Beach has better stuff off the beach.”

Once anglers have found a spot or two to fish, it’s just a matter of getting the right baits to the fish. The Bierstedts use a spread of five rods and various rigs and baits, depending upon just where and when they’ve chosen to fish.

“Typically, I’ll have two lines on down-riggers, two long lines — one on one side of the boat and the other way down the middle — and one line on an outrigger,” Rod Bierstedt said. “I like to use Ugly Stick live-bait rods with 20-pound Momoi monofilament on the reel, and No. 4 wire on my rigs. I’ll fish some baits naked and some with Ugly Bug skirts.

The Bierstedts will fish live baits if they’re particularly interested in catching big kings — such as in a tournament situation — but they’re also convinced dead baits, presented correctly, often outfish live baits.

“Live-baiting is fun, but it takes a lot of time,” Rod Bierstedt said. “Pogeys (menhaden) can be tough to catch.

“You can fish pogeys, and kings will eat ’em, especially when you’re fishing around inlets. But the reality is, when they’re out on the reefs and wrecks, they’re normally feeding on something else — cigar minnows, sardines, flying fish. That’s why a king will eat a dead cigar minnow over a live pogey.

“Most of the time when we’re chartering, we don’t use live bait because it can be hard to find and take up too much of our fishing time. You can run ballyhoo or cigar minnows, and if I’ve got good ones, I’m partial to cigar minnows. A king will hit a dead cigar minnow with a beautiful live pogey right next to it.

“A real good live bait is a live bluefish because in the fall kings love to kill bluefish. They’re easy to jig up or troll up, and if you have one bluefish in your spread, that’s the bait a king will hit.”

The Bierstedts fish live baits using a standard live-bait rig consisting of a 30-pound barrel swivel, No. 4 wire and haywire twists that attach a single hook in the bait’s nose, then a No. 6 treble in his back, plus an extra No. 6 treble “stinger” hook swinging freely a few inches behind the bait’s tail.

“The third hook violates IGFA rules for records, but you catch a lot more fish if you have one,” Rod Bierstedt said.

The Bierstedts also fish a double-menhaden rig on occasion right in the prop wash behind their outboards, with two baits attached to their own rigs hitched to the same swivel.

“When I’m fishing live bait, the long line is typically a naked pogey, and one of the down-riggers will have a skirted pogey,” Rod Bierstedt said. “I usually run two or three naked baits in a spread and a couple with skirts.”

The Bierstedts also like to fish a combination of live and dead baits when they’re fishing around wrecks, reefs and ledges.

“I’ll run a 3-2 spread on reefs, with two dead baits — one on a down-rigger,” he said. “If we’re in 60 feet of water, I want a dead cigar minnow on one down-rigger around 30 feet down — halfway to the bottom — and I want a live bait on the other down-rigger at 15 feet, about halfway between the surface and the other down-rigger.”

Besides being deadly on kings, using dead baits allows the Bierstedts to work a little faster.

“Using dead baits, you can troll a little faster — maybe 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 knots,” Rod Bierstedt said. “You can cover more territory, and at certain times of the year, that can be beneficial. I think you can cover about twice as much water with dead bait as you can with live bait.”

Barry Bierstedt said he and his father like to run their dead cigar minnows with a modified live-bait rig. The treble that goes in the bait’s back and the stinger hook stay the same, but they tie on one of three different lures — a Hank Brown Hookup jig, a Barefoot Tackle Gitzem jig — to stick through the bait’s nose to keep it “swimming” upright and not spinning. The bucktails may range from a quarter-ounce to several ounces in size, depending upon the size of the bait and the strength of the current.

Barry Bierstedt pushes the hook up through the bait’s lower jaw and pushes it out his nose. The heavy lead acts as a trolling sinker that keeps the bait on plane.

The Bierstedts do two other things when they’re slow-trolling live or dead baits that can be important — and often are overlooked. They switch out the wire on their down-rigger and use 250-pound Power Pro.

“You don’t want your wire to hum when you’re slow-trolling,” Rod Bierstedt said.

The other different technique is to chum.

“In tournaments we’ll grind up fish on board and chum with it,” Rod Bierstedt said. “Most of the time, we just use a little menhaden oil.”

The method of delivery of the menhaden oil is ingenious. The Bierstedts save small soda bottles — 10- or 12-ounce sizes are perfect. They drill a hole through the bottle’s plastic, screw-on cap, and thread a length of heavy monofilament through the hole, tying a big knot on the underside of the cap to hold the rig together. Menhaden oil is poured into the bottle, then the cap — Bierstedt has poked five or six holes in it with an ice pick — is screwed back on. The tag end of the heavy monofilament is tied to a clip, then the whole shebang is clipped to the down-rigger cannonball so the oil can seep out at the same depth where they already have baits.

The Bierstedts pay a lot of attention to their GPS and sonar units, not just to help them locate underwater structure, but to immediately mark spots that show up by chance.

“Anytime we get a strike, we’ll hit the button on the GPS that marks that spot so we can go back and get back on what the fish was around when he struck,” Rod Bierstedt said. “That’s how Barry found a couple of nice ledges inshore of the dredge one day.”

Barry Bierstedt is also careful to be patient with the rod in his hand after he’s gotten a strike but no hookup. He drops the tip, peels off some line and lets what’s left of his bait float down through the water.

“A lot of people, when a king pops the bait loose, if he doesn’t scream off with it, they’ll reel in,” Rod Bierstedt said. “When a king is feeding and slashes at a bait, he’ll kill the bait, then he’ll circle back and eat it. If you drop it back like Barry does, he’ll come back and pound it, but he can’t if it’s not there.”