Red Song Rising

A talented coastal musician has a sweet melody for October red drum and flounder.

The moving tide draining the tidal marsh bumped a 3-inch-long shrimp along the bottom with an occasional scrape and bounce off scattered oyster shells. Suddenly the bait stopped moving, and the sensation racing up the line to the rod changed. The shrimp had stopped moving, but it wasn’t hung; it had been gulped by a hungry redfish.

With a slight bow of his rod tip, Capt. Chris Bellamy gave the fish enough time to get the bait in its mouth. After the fish’s next move, he jerked back strongly and drove the point of the hook deep into its jaw.

Immediately, the shallow water boiled as the hooked drum surged and rolled. The hearty boil on the surface of the shallow marsh creek revealed the exact location of the attack and would serve as a bullseye for many casts to follow.

In the shallow water, the fleeing fish created a surface wake with each move. First the drum surged with the current then swung to the outer edge of the small flat, then it bulled upstream.

With surges and rolls every inch of the way, the fight lasted several minutes. Bellamy was able to lead the tired redfish to the side of the boat and, once subdued, the angler slipped his Boga Grip over the fish’s lower jaw to secure and lift it from the water.

After we admired the feisty red, Bellamy deftly removed the jig-head from the drum’s lower jaw and eased it over the side.

Before releasing the drum, he cradled it lightly and swam it in the current for a few seconds to make sure it was fully revived and ready to go. As the drum darted back to the safety of deeper water, it was unaware of the smiles it had brought to two anglers.

“Man, these drum are something special, aren’t they?” Bellamy said as he readjusted the Berkley Gulp shrimp on the 1/4-ounce DOA CAL jig-head. “They might not always be here at the same stage of the tide, but they’ll move through here sometime during it.

“On the high tide, they’re farther up in the marsh, chasing minnows, shrimp, crabs and sand fiddlers, but as the tide drops, they have to retreat to deeper water or one of the main channels. This flat is one of their favorite places.

“I like to fish the falling tide, but they come back through as the tide rises and also usually bite then.

“You think this guy was up in some shallow water, but it was fully covering him. I’ve seen them grubbing along through here with not just their tails, but part of their backs out of the water. It’s a wonder their bellies aren’t scarred from scrubbing against the oysters.”

The scene occurred at one of several small creeks we visited last fall during an excellent fishing day. We worked the ebbing tide throughout the morning, then took a lunch break during slack tide at Sears Landing in Surf City.

With our previously growling stomachs sated from huge sloppy chili cheeseburgers, we set out again to fish the flooding tide throughout the afternoon.

During the course of the day, after a start behind Figure Eight Island, we fished a couple of creeks behind Lee Island, then worked several cuts behind Topsail Island. At mid-afternoon, we reversed our route and tried a couple of the same spots before heading back to Bellamy’s slip at Masons Landing off Middle Sound Loop Road at Ogden.

Bellamy’s background as a song writer makes him a natural story-teller. His tales almost equaled the fishing fun we had that day, as he spun yarns of days spent fishing these marshes and those near Sebastian, Fla., where he has a second home.

Bellamy said as a youth he learned his way through small creeks by following commercial crabbers as they worked their pots. They needed, he said, more than 18 inches of water in the main channels to work pots and floats that served double duty as deep-water markers.

The crabbers also were excellent sources of information, he said, as they often stumbled upon large pods of feeding drum.

From Wrightsville Beach to Surf City, the marshes between the Intracoastal Waterway and the islands are well nourished by water moving between the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. While they aren’t big inlets, Mason, Rich and New Topsail inlets are within a 9-mile stretch of the coast.

New Topsail is the only one of these inlets deep enough to have a marked channel, but the constant flow of water through all of them keeps the water clean and creates an excellent exchange of baitfish with the marshes.

Bellamy’s “day job” is really a night job as a musician. He often works late then has a charter fishing trip early in the morning. He said his beauty sleep didn’t work much any more, but that hour or so he once might have used collecting bait before his clients arrives is some of his most important sleep time. Instead, he said, now he relies on artificial baits rather than using part of the charter to gather live baits. But he doesn’t hesitate to switch to live baits if the artificials aren’t producing.

For our trip he rigged 1/8- and 1/4-ounce jig-heads with medium-light spinning gear. The reels were filled with 10- and 20-pound-test Power Pro minimum-diameter braided line, with 2-foot leaders of 25-pound-test fluorocarbon.

The jig-heads were light enough to drift with the current, but the lighter one moved slightly faster and a little higher in the water column.

“By starting with the different-weight jig-heads, we can see if the drum have a preference of how the bait is moving,“ Bellamy said. “If they’re biting one (jig-head) better than the other, we switch to that weight for all the lines. It’s amazing how on different days, but at the same stage of the tide, redfish sometimes show a preference for a bait that’s acting just a slight bit different.”

During our trip he chose Berkley Gulp baits almost exclusively, most of the time bouncing the 3-inch shrimp shapes with the current. A few times we switched to grub and mullet shapes.

During this trip, the top-producing shrimp color was white, but Bellamy said usually the best shade was natural or new penny. The top color for minnow imitations was smoke and smoke/black with a white belly.

Early in the day we had difficulty catching drum because flounders snagged the lures, not a particularly upsetting dilemma. The flounders showed a preference for the 3-inch natural shrimp and attacked that color Gulp lure with abandon.

Unlike with many live baits, waiting for the flatfish to get a Gulp shrimp completely in their mouths wasn’t necessary. They literally jumped off the bottoms of the shallow creeks, nailed the shrimp lures and headed back to enjoy their meal on the bottom. Most of the flounder set the hooks with the viciousness of their strikes.

Even though we were fishing for drum, we caught more than a half-dozen flounder, with most of them being keeper size (14 inches) and larger.

One of the flounders sucked down a Gulp shrimp so deeply we couldn’t get it out without seriously injuring the fish. That flounder went into the release well of Bellamy’s Chaos Flats Boat to see if it might regurgitate the hook.

When it didn’t, the flatfish was invited home to be the featured guest at supper.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chaos Boatworks (www.chaosboatworks.com) is a local company, based at Hampstead, inland of where the author and Bellamy fished to gain information for this story. It builds a “Carolina Flats Boat“ with a Carolina flare and a tumble-home transom. Choas is working on a bay boat with similar lines.