Bald Spots

Bays around Bald Head Island are great for late-summer puppy drum.

North Carolina’s coastal red drum numbers are a monument to nearly a decade of effective management by the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries and, yes, even the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission. Want to catch a few reds from, for instance, January through December? Just haul your boat to the beach and cruise shallow inshore waters.

September is as good a month as any to pursue skinny-water red drum. Guide Lewis Emery of Tails Up Charters in Wilmington not only loves to chase these fish, he particularly enjoys catching them on topwater lures.

Think you’ve been excited by watching a marlin or sailfish attack a trolled ballyhoo? If you don’t mind putting in the hours to witness such an event, have at it. But what if you could get caught up in splashing, rod-bending, adrenaline-pumping surface scrambles as fast as you can cast toward a marsh edge?

That’s topwater fishing for reds these days.

Of course, it’s not that easy.

The first rule of any type of successful fishing is finding a place where the fish live. But with red drum spread from the Outer Banks beaches, across Pamlico and Albemarle sounds and south to nearly every brackish-water depression, marsh and stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway all the way to the South Carolina border, the problem is not in choosing a spot but deciding which is the spot.

Emery, a transplanted Floridian, was lucky enough to have a minister dad and mom who settled at Wilmington before he got hitched to a Texas girl who likes fishing almost as much as he does.

It’s just a short haul from their home down US 421 to the public ramp at Federal Point near Fort Fisher and the many shallow bays between Fort Fisher and Bald Head Island.

This wondrous place may be the most scenic — and closest to the pounding surf — of any saltwater marsh along the North Carolina coast. It’s dissected by a maze of small creeks and passageways and hundreds of oyster-shell beds and marsh islands. On the west side, it is bordered by a rock wall built in the 1890s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Aimed at controlling tides and preventing silting of the Cape Fear River by sand transported through now-filled-in Corncake Inlet, the wall has many breaches, just large enough to allow passage of reds, specks and flounder but not wide enough to allow a boat to slip through from river to bay and vice versa.

So what’s basically been created is a monstrously-large saltwater lake, with all types of structure that create a perfect playground for gamefish, notably reds.

The water at low tide at most areas is usually between two and six feet deep. At high tide, depths may reach eight feet — perfect for a shallow-draft boat or wade fishing.

“You can come back here with a fly rod, anchor your boat at some places when you find a school of reds, get out and wade and catch fish,” said Emery, who spends his time away from his boat at Island Hardware & Tackle in Carolina Beach, a business owned by Dennis Barbour, another veteran guide.

Fly-casting to red drum is a purist’s ultimate dream. Hookups with a fly rod aren’t guaranteed but can be spectacular.

But while Emery has taken fly fishermen on redfish expeditions, his typical trips involve live bait or artificial lures, and baitcasting or spinning outfits. When fun-fishing, he’s joined by his wife, or often, friend Larry Essick, 65, a former home builder from Greenville, S.C., who for years had his eye on Wilmington as a place to enjoy his retirement.

“We both love fishing topwater lures for reds,” said Essick.

The key to finding reds in the bays north of Bald Head and Smith islands is deciding where they want to fish and threading safely through the creeks at The Basin, First and Second bays, Zekes Island, False Channel and Buzzard Bay.

“It’s best to have a shallow-draft boat and fish a few hours before and after high tide,” said Emery, who runs a Carolina Skiff. “If you don’t know your way around here, you can mess up a lower unit in a hurry on an oyster rock hump, especially at low tide.”

Emery like to stick in the channel when he leaves the ramp at Fort Fisher, heading south. He stays off the rock wall that extends toward the northern tip of Smith Island, then he skirts the edge of land looking for reds in the creeks.

“This (route) is where the channel is,” he said. “I’m looking for tailing fish along the rocks.”

Redfish “tail” when they grub on the bottom for the small crabs that make up the majority of their diet. If they go noses down in fairly shallow water, it’s often easy to spot their tails, leisurely waving above the surface.

“A favorite food of reds is oyster crabs,” Emery said. “They also like shrimp and will eat finger mullet.”

Few other sights get the heartbeat of an angler beating faster than spotting a tailing red, because it means the fish is hungry and he can be targeted with a cast or two.

Before that can happen, however, one other problem must be surmounted — finding them.

It’s not that red drum aren’t everywhere in the bays and creeks, it’s that usually they’re found in schools, especially during late summer, and some places have more food than others.

“It usually takes some looking to find a school of reds,” Emery said. “Like all other fish, reds run the edges of the marsh when it’s high tide. But the schools could be anywhere (in the bays), and this is a big place.

“If you can see ’em tailin’ in the shallow grass, you’re at the right spot. We also find ’em in the ditches (creeks).

“Once you find the reds, that’s when you can have some fun.”

One of Emery’s favorite spots to find red drum, he said, “is the edge of ‘rips.’ You’ll have calm water and something on the bottom will break up the current. Those are especially good places, too, to find speckled trout if there’s an oyster bed on the bottom.”

On high tides, good spots tend to be at the edges of spartina-grass marsh islands inside the bays. Redfish often school on windy points, presumably because wind blows plankton across those points, which attracts baitfish, and baitfish attract drum. Even though reds are mostly bottom-feeders, they’re suckers for finger mullet and shrimp, so they’ll readily attack sub-surface and topwater lures and “soft” baits.

Emery uses his trolling motor and the wind to control drifts, running parallel to marsh-grass edges about 30 feet from the shoreline. He casts cigar-shaped topwater baits — SheDogs, Top Dogs or Skitter Walks — in front of his boat, along the edges and uses an erratic “walk-the-dog” retrieve to make the lures dance back to him in a zig-zag pattern.

Plenty of times, pausing a SheDog and following with a twitch will result in a spray of water and a hooked red.

Emery and Essick doubled up on a pair of nice reds on one drift, with a 26-inch fish hitting Emery’s SheDog and another, slightly smaller fish blowing up on Essick’s bait.

After the double-header, the action continued for a good 90 minutes, from 6:30 to 8 p.m., involving around a dozen more reds and an equal number of blowups that didn’t result in hookups.

Reluctant to head back to Fort Fisher as dark approached, Emery said some fishermen will stay and fish at dark, which is akin to using a Jitterbug for farm-pond bass at dusk. However, even experts need light to navigate the narrow channels when returning, along with a thorough knowledge of the bays’ shallow and deep areas.

“Red-fishing over here is kind of a hit-or-miss thing,” Emery said. “You might get down there and immediately find a school of reds. Then again, it might take you a couple hours of looking and casting to find a school.”

Even if you do, action isn’t always immediate. Like all fish, reds have feeding periods and other times when they just like to cruise. But on these bays, the bite will start at some point for a patient fisherman.

It’s just a matter of being there.