The shallow flats behind Hatteras and Ocracoke islands offer tremendous October trout fishing, but putting the pieces together to catch grays and specks takes experience.
The Outer Banks are a mystery to many fishermen because there’s just so much water. To the casual observer or weekend visitor, it all looks the same if one stands on the sound side near the southern end of Hatteras island and gazes across Hatteras Inlet to Ocracoke or turns back toward expansive Pamlico Sound. One sees miles of water, broken only by an occasional buoy marker or pound net.
It’s a place literally millions of fish call home. But as any angler understands, the first step to success is finding at least an area code or zip code for the species of one’s choice — a way to break down the hundreds of thousands of acres into prime real estate and dead water.
The dozen or so inshore guides who regularly fish from Hatteras know how to do just that. They understand the subtleties of the sound are the infinite changes at its bottom — undulating sandy banks, reefs, broken flats, oyster rocks, deep holes and sloughs that crisscross Pamlico Sound. They can make an educated guess as to how changing tides might affect fishing, and how weather changes are liable to cause movements of fish.
Being able to do that means having the acumen to take an average day and turn it into a good one or accept a tough day and scratch out an acceptable catch for their clients.
That’s the task Ken Dempsey of Hatteras and Doug Martin of the nearby village of Frisco face almost every day. The two guides carry dozens of fishermen each year in search of one of North Carolina’s most-popular saltwater species — spotted seatrout.
For them, October is a special month, the end of gray trout or “weakfish” season and the peak of the season for speckled trout when the biggest fish show up in amazing numbers.
“A (typical) October is probably our best month,” said Dempsey, a Greensboro native who moved to the Outer Banks more a decade ago and set up a business guiding inshore anglers and duck hunters from Oden’s Dock at Hatteras.
“You see the same fish throughout the year, but the quality is better, and they’re in bigger schools in the fall,” said Dempsey (252-986-2102).
“They’re grouping up because they’re all moving in the direction of the inlet as the weather starts to cool off.
“And anytime in the fall when you get a nor’easter or northerly blow, you’ll see a mass movement of fish.”
Martin, who has been fishing at the Outer Banks for more than 20 years, runs Hallelujah Charters from Teach’s Lair Marina at Hatteras. He agreed fish are found in much better numbers from late September through early November than the rest of the year because cooler waters move all species toward the ocean.
“It really has to do with the weather and water temperature,” said Martin (252-995-5643). “That’s what’s gonna push the fish. They’ll pour out of the sound, even in September, after a hard cold front or a tropical storm. That will move them like crazy. Then they work their way back and forth.”
So the ticket to good fishing for specks and grays is to find the underwater highways they’re using to travel to the inlet to the vast ocean beyond. Punching that ticket is a matter of figuring out what it is that lies on the floor of the sound that guides trout in the direction of the big water.
For Dempsey, it’s easy to describe to an outsider what he’s seeking. But finding those kinds of spots, well, that’s another matter.
“What you’re looking for are sloughs near the inlet that have moving water,” he said. “The farther you go into October, the closer the fish get to the inlet. There’ll be some good specks around, and the main sloughs and ditches that have current will be the best places to fish. But there’ll still be some back in the sound at the edges of grass flats that have little deepwater edges.”
At the peak of the fall run, even the best guides will sample “community holes,” places that are marked on most maps and most accessible to the average fishermen. Such places include the ferry harbors at Hatteras and Ocracoke, the deep ferry channel between the islands, and Barney’s Slough behind Hatteras or the Sloop Channel at the Ocracoke side of the inlet.
Each of these areas in common deep water, and that’s where the majority of gray trout will be, and where the specks will be heading.
Dempsey said he doesn’t typically catch a lot of nice gray trout in the fall. He spends most of his time fishing for specks because the grays he comes in contact with tend to be a little on the small side — the better-class fish having been caught throughout the summer.
Martin stays after ’em, even going out in the ocean to vertical jig along the bottom after they leave the sound — typically earlier than specks.
“Once the weather gets cold, it doesn’t seem like there are any in the sound anymore,” he said. “They probably leave earlier than specks. By November, they’ll be gone.
“I catch a lot of grays in the ocean, for the most part, watching birds and looking for bait and (fish) marks on the bottom. In the sound, the gray trout can be in shallow water near grass, but they tend to hang out more in the deeper water, at structure.
“You can catch ’em with speck rigs, depending on where they are, but they also love grubs. If you find ’em in water that’s more than 12-feet deep, it seems like something else works better — a double-bucktail speck rig or a Stingsilver.”
Dempsey said it’s not unusual to catch grays and specks in the same areas — just not in with each other.
“Grays will trickle out of the sound from mid to late October, and you can find ’em in deep holes and jig ’em up,” he said. “There are probably 10 good deep holes around Hatteras Inlet, and you just make your milk run to all of ’em.
“A lot of times, when you’re drifting across a slough, you’ll catch grays out in the deep water, and just about when you get ready to crank your motor up as you drift up on the edge, that’s when you start to hit the specks.
“For whatever reason, you can catch a lot of little grays in the fall, but not many of the bigger guys. Anybody who wants to catch grays can take a 2-ounce spoon and catch a hundred a day out in the ocean, but it may take you a hundred to get a limit. There are loads of fish from 7- go 13-inches long — a ton from 11- to 11 1/2 inches.
“Most of the guides will be heading in the opposite direction — going in the sound to try and catch real quality specks.”
Martin said there doesn’t always appear to be rhyme nor reason behind where he catches specks. Some spots that are dynamite one day can be empty the next, and when fish are really biting during an ebbing tide, they may turn their noses up at any bait cast their way during a rising tide.
“It’s just fishing,” he said. “You can be there at the peak of the season and still have a bad day. Then, there are days when everywhere you go, it seems like they’re biting.
“They’re on a lot of places, then some days, they’re not there. It’s a process of elimination. They’ll get in a rhythm for a little while, then they change. Some places might be better on a certain tide, then it may change to the other tide. You’ve just got to work it out.
“But you want to be in moving water when you’re fishing around the inlet; it seems to make a big difference. Back in the sound, it doesn’t make as much of a difference; sometimes, you can’t hardly tell (the water) is moving at all.”
Dempsey said he catches most of his specks anywhere from 3 1/2- to 5 1/2-feet deep, at the edges of grass flats that drop off into deep water or “points” along the edges of large reefs where the bottom slopes off gradually into deeper water. He’ll try to drift at those areas or drift across them. When he thinks he’s found a good concentration of fish — or he’s caught them in an area for several days — he’ll anchor and cast to certain spots.
“Some of the storms we’ve had in the past couple of years have covered up a lot of the grass we had, but I see it growing in other areas now,” he said. “Any slough with grass is better for trout; grass is a big deal. If it’s just a sand slough with no grass, you’re looking at a place for grays. This is the kind of thing that keeps trout fishermen going. There are so many subtleties.
“You’ll catch ’em on the same tide, and they might be in the same areas, but you have to figure ’em out every day. One day they might want to hit a grub under a cork; the next day it might be a MirrOLure, then maybe the next day a grub — but they’ll want it swimming instead of hopping.
“Those little things make a lot of differences, but what you’ve really got to do is keep your stuff in front of ’em.”
The Sloop Channel and Barney’s Slough are wide, fairly deep ditches that run almost perpendicular to the shoreline at the sound side of Hatteras and Ocracoke islands. They’ve been great trout holes for years, as have the ferry basins and the deep ferry channel. And there’s a dredge channel at the backside of Hatteras a mile or so from the inlet where sand was dredged to replace damage from Hurricane Isabel in 2003 that holds a lot of good, deeper water.
Dempsey also likes to fish a large area of open water between Rollison’s Channel (which runs well out into the sound from the Hatteras village area) all the way to Barney’s Slough to the southwest. The area is broken bottom, with scattered humps and clumps of grass and oyster rocks, dips and ditches.
“It’s a big, open area, and fish will move through it,” he said. “At any given time, you can drift through it and catch fish.
“In the big channels, you really need to fish a double-bucktail rig if there’s any (current) at all, and even then, you’ll just be snatching it off the bottom and letting it fall back,” Dempsey said. “You can use soft plastics if there’s no tide at all.
“I like to try and see where the greatest concentrations of baits are, and a lot of the baits we have in the fall are finger mullets. The mullet run is always strong, and it’ll build up. Anytime baits build up like that, specks will be close by.”
Martin said the mullet run tends to taper off by mid October, but trout will have all kinds of pinfish, small spots and croakers on which to feed.
But getting them to bite can be a daily test.
“MirrOLures will work real good some days, then the next day, it’s the old standard grub — white with a pink tail is a good one,” Martin said. “I’ve got all colors, and some days, it seems like they want some colors more than others.
“I can go one day and catch ’em really good using one color, and the next day, it’s another color. But it may just be the guy throwing it.”
Dempsey likes to fish a curly-tail grub or a DOA Shrimp about 40 inches behind a popping cork. He also uses MirrOLures or other hard, sinking baits, but like most trout fishermen, his main offerings are grubs of various shapes, sizes and colors.
He tends to fish them with quarter-ounce lead-head jigs, but if he’s fishing an area with deeper water (8 to 12 feet), he’ll go to a 3/8-ounce head. If he’s prospecting for grays in even deeper water, he may switch to a half-ounce head.
“If I only had one color I had to fish, I’d choose all white, because there are so many finger mullet they’re feeding on,” he said. “But for hard baits such as a MirrOLure, you can get away with more gaudy colors. I really like a pink/white sinking MirrOLure.”
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