Different fish, different spots, different rigs, but all on the same day.
The image, burned into the memory of a 9-year-old boy, hasn’t faded. How do you erase the sight of a man walking along the shoreline, a cane pole in one hand and across his shoulder a stringer of flounder, each as wide as his back?
It was my first saltwater fishing adventure. My family always vacationed at Carolina Beach, but this morning, instead of spending the day digging in the wet sand with my 6-year-old sister and capturing sand fleas under my mother’s watchful eyes, my dad woke me in the dark.
He’d talked the previous day to a grizzled resident at a restaurant facing Carolina Beach Marina where the head boats docked and the locals came for breakfast. Almost 60 years later, I remember the man’s name — Mr. Whitehead.
“He’s the best flounder fisherman here,” my father said. “We’re going on a boat ride with him to fish from the bank somewhere. We’ll do what he says, and maybe we’ll have flounder for dinner.”
My dad loved few meals better than fried flounder, cole slaw and hush puppies.
At the marina, we climbed into Mr. Whitehead’s large wooden dinghy with a stern outboard and headed north. My memory is that, after a long ride, he beached the boat with Mason Inlet at our left. In July 1956, the first rocks for the long jetty hadn’t been dropped at the Wrightsville Beach side.
Mr. Whitehead had a bucket of live finger mullet, and he showed us how to hook them on one of his home-made flounder rigs — no spinners or beads, just a barrel sinker, large-diameter leader and a J-hook). After flipping a minnow into the water, he slowly walked along the shoreline as the tide rose. He said to stop walking if we felt something grab the bait or it felt like “you hit a rock.” He said to wait for “at least a count of 100” before setting the hook, an impossible task for a 9-year-old.
I must have been a fast counter, because I lost every minnow and didn’t catch a fish. Meanwhile every so often, Mr. Whitehead stopped to fire up a Camel cigarette, which he smoked down to his yellow-stained fingers. When he finished, he’d snap the cane pole up and the fight would begin.
“Ah, so that’s the secret,” I said. “Smokin’ cigarettes.”
No hope for a boy to catch a flounder.
My dad, who didn’t smoke, also didn’t catch a fish, while Mr. Whitehead landed a tow sack of doormats.
Since then, Carolina Beach has seen good times and bad. During the 1950s and 1960s, it was the poor people’s Myrtle Beach — no golf courses or traffic, just great fishing. After undergoing municipal face lifts, hurricanes and a real-estate boom during the 1990s, North Carolina’s oldest resort town now has an upscale look, but the fishing still can be outstanding.
Fortunately, shrimp trawlers haven’t worked Myrtle Grove Sound or Masonboro Inlet; they’re too narrow with too many bottom snags. Although gill-netting for some species persists, gigging flounder, red drum or spotted seatrout for sale is prohibited, according to N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries rules.
The relatively low amount of commercial pressure on the inshore waters from Wrightsville Beach to Fort Fisher has allowed the three species that comprise the “Carolina Beach Slam” — flounder, trout and hard-pulling red drum — to thrive.
With tighter recreational size and creel limits, plus the turtle lawsuit that has sporadically halted use of large-mesh gill nets, Carolina Beach is a good starting point for anglers seeking a “slam.”
No one does it better locally than Dennis Barbour, the town’s former mayor who owns of Island Hardware and Tackle, and his son Wes, a 27-year-old Appalachian State grad who also guides.
One morning last July, Wes Barbour already had a full day’s supply of finger mullet and mud minnows for four anglers — unless the bite was extremely strong or the anglers were dense about knowing when to set a hook.
“I think the first we should try to go after are flounder,” Dennis Barbour said. “The wind is light, and it’s calm off the beach, so we’ll probably do okay fishing one of the local wrecks.”
After a bounce or two going out of Carolina Beach Inlet, Barbour pointed the bow toward the southeast. The ocean was calm, with gentle rollers. Within 10 minutes, he had guided his center-console skiff about a or so mile off the beach to AR 370, called “The Liberty Ship” by locals but officially the Meares Harris Reef.
Resting on the bottom in 55 feet of water are a 440-foot Liberty Ship, the Alexander Ramsey, two tugboats 105- and 110-feet long, a 50-foot truck tank, two barges and 155 tons of concrete pipe.
“It’s got some structure for fish, no doubt about that,” Dennis Barbour said.
Wes Barbour went to the bow and played out anchor line until his father, peering at the depth finder unit, had the boat positioned exactly where it needed to be — slightly upcurrent from the edge of some of the submerged structure.
“The flounder don’t get in the wrecks so much as you find them around the edges,” Dennis Barbour said. “Sometimes all of ’em will be on one side of a wreck or bottom structure, and none will be on the other side.”
The Barbours had several 7-foot Shimano Tescata rods and Tiagra reels spooled with 20-pound braided line tied to a swivel, which separated the braide from a 10- to 20-inch leader of 20-pound monofilament. The terminal tackle included a 1- or 2-ounce barrel weight above the swivel with a 3/0 to 4/0 Owner Cutting Point wide-gap hook tied to the line’s end.
For catching flounder in deeper water, the Barbours like to hook 3- to 5-inch finger mullet through the lower half of the jaw, bringing the point out between the nostrils. Some anglers prefer to hook mullet horizontally through the nostrils, which also allows the bait a more free swimming motion.
They like to cast the rig 25 to 35 feet from the boat and allow the sinker to take the baitfish to the bottom; thumbing a baitcasting reel lightly helps prevent backlashes. Then, you slowly pull the weight along the bottom with the rod tip, then reel up the slack — identical to fishing a Carolina rig for largemouth bass. Keep moving the sinker and bait until it’s out of the strike zone, then reel in and repeat.
“This is a little different than fishing inshore docks or oyster rocks,” Wes Barbour said. “In the ocean, a lot of fish will eat a finger mullet. Inside, you’d let a flounder hold a bait a while to turn it in his mouth, (but) in the ocean, you don’t need to wait as long. I think flounder know something else might come along and grab the bait, especially sharks.”
Flounder bites at 25, 30 or 40 feet often impart a “mushy” feel to a rod tip, or they can be savage jerks and hard runs. But flounder in the ocean generally don’t mess with baits; they thump them fairly hard or will just begin to swim away. Fishing around this much structure, getting hung up and losing terminal tackle is inevitable.
“If you don’t get hung up when you fish like this, you’re not fishing the right places,” said Dennis Barbour, who landed the day’s first fish, a 2-pound flounder, with minutes of anchoring the boat. Then Wes Barbour got in on the action, landing three or four nice fish in the 2- to 3-pound range. The guests, meanwhile, landed one flounder and a few blow toads.
“Flounder fishing starts in May when the mullet and menhaden arrive, then (it) gets really good near the end of July,” Dennis Barbour said. “It gets better every day and is best during October. All summer long, you can catch flounder at these wrecks.”
To stay on track for an inshore slam, Dennis Barbour pulled up anchor and headed inshore. Passing through the inlet, he headed through Snow’s Cut into the Cape Fear River and downstream to a spot known as the “Dredge Hole.” With a small opening, it expands to a round back of about 25 acres created by a beach-renourishment program. Best known as a place to find menhaden for king mackerel bait, the Dredge Hole is an excellent spot to catch red drum or speckled trout.
At the entrance to the hole, Wes Barbour dropped the trolling motor and maneuvered the skiff parallel to the shoreline. The same baits were used, just under popping-cork rigs that were cast toward the shoreline and “popped” with a flick of the wrist and the rod tip.
Specks were quick to respond.
“Got a bite,” said Herbie Holmes of Snow Camp as his float disappeared and he set the hook. After a short fight, Wes Barbour netted a pretty 2 1/2-pound trout as Holmes beamed.
“They’ll hit artificial lures, too, but I think when the water’s warm enough that we have lots of baitfish, you’ll get more hits (using bait),” Wes said. “Pinfish are bad in the summer, too, and they’ll go through scented soft-plastic grubs pretty fast.”
Everyone managed to land specks at the entrance to the Dredge Hole, the best a 3 1/2-pounder.
After putting four or five nice, eating-size trout in the fish box, Dennis Barbour motored back to the inlet, where we tried drifting for red drum on the incoming tide at Masonboro Island’s southern tip. The current was too swift for effective fishing, although four anglers did manage to catch one red.
“I’ve got one other spot where I found a good school of red drum a couple weeks ago,” Dennis Barbour said. “I just don’t know if they’ll still be there.”
After a short ride, he maneuvered the skiff to a spot near the entrance to a condo/boat club where pleasure craft entered and exited. Wes Barbour tied the skiff’s bow to a single piling.
By this time, most of the finger mullets had been used, leaving only mud minnows in the livewell.
Dennis Barbour explained that his rigs for reds would feature 1/2-ounce barrel sinkers, and that we’d cast toward the main channel, where watercraft of all descriptions whizzed past, making noise and creating wakes.
“There’s an oyster bed out there,” Dennis said. “You’ll feel your lead weight bouncing over the rocks when you retrieve it. Sometimes you might get hung, but if you work the rod tip you usually can get free.”
The main advantage, he said, of fishing in this busy place was red drum hang out at oyster reefs. They love the small oyster crabs that live inside oyster shells. But not only did they like to eat oyster crabs, we discovered reds love mud minnows — a lot.
Within five minutes Wes and Holmes were fighting surging drum that had devoured 1 1/2-inch minnows. After pole-bending, drag-screeching battles, they landed reds measuring 26 and 32 inches.
Over the next 15 minutes, four more healthy, bronze-sided beauties, were caught and released.
“It’s hard to believe a red that size will eat a bait that small,” I said to Dennis.
“I think mud minnows are like popcorn to them,” he said, smiling. “They can’t eat just one.”
Popcorn is what you eat at a party, and we’d completed a slam party in half a day, something that’s surprisingly possible at Carolina Beach.
DESTINATION INFORMATION
HOW TO GET THERE/WHEN TO GO — Carolina Beach is most-easily accessed through Wilmington, which is the eastern terminus of I-40. Leave the interstate and take NC 132 (College Road) south toward Carolina Beach. NC 132 eventually becomes US 421/Carolina Beach Road. It’s a drive of only a few miles to a public ramp on the south side of Snow’s Cut or a ramp at Carolina Beach State Park. Good flounder fishing begins in May and runs through mid-November.
TACKLE/TECHNIQUES — Baitcasting or spinning rods 6 1/2- to 7-foot mated with reels spooled with 20-pound line are typical weapons of fishermen targeting flounder, trout or red fish. Use a Carolina rig with a 3/0 to 4/0 wide-gap hook around wrecks or reefs. Targeting speckled trout is best done with popping cork rigs and either live bait or soft-plastics. Mud minnows are the most-productive baits for reds, but finger mullet are tops for flounder around the reefs and wrecks and speckled trout.
FISHING INFO/GUIDES — Wes Barbour, Dennis Barbour, Carolina Beach Fishing Charters, 910-458-3049; Island Tackle and Hardware, www.islandtacklecharters.com. See also Guides and Charters in Classifieds.
ACCOMMODATIONS — Sleep Inn, Wilmington, 910-313-6665; MainStay Suites, Wilmington, 910-392-1741; Cape Fear Convention and Visitors Bureau, 877-406-2356, www.cape-fear.nc.us.
MAPS — Sealake Fishing Guides, 800-411-0185, www.thegoodspots.com; Capt Segull’s Nautical Charts, 888-473-4855, www.captainsegullcharts.com; GMCO’s Chartbook of North Carolina, GMCO’s Chartbook of North Carolina, 888-420-6277, www.gmcomaps.com.
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