Although the Army Corps of Engineers dug Snow’s Cut at Carolina Beach to help shipping, they also created N.C.’s best big flounder hole.
During the 1930s, the construction wizards of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created a shortcut to carry shipped goods between the Cape Fear River and Myrtle Grove Sound, which separates Carolina Beach from the mainland south of Wilmington. The man-made canal allowed ships to leave the Carolina Beach area and travel approximately 1 mile to a section of the river about 10 miles downstream from Wilmington. This deep, man-made swath through the sand saved vessels at least 25 miles, letting them avoid the treacherous shoals of Cape Fear en route to inland ports.
Whether or not they knew it, the same time they were lending a hand to local navigation, the Corps’ engineers were building a flounder haven. By blasting out rocks and stumps and digging a deep trench to aid shipping, they unknowingly created some of the best flounder habitat anywhere at the North Carolina coast.
The canal was named after one of the engineers who built it, Maj. W.A. Snow. Whether or not he fished for flounder and understood what he was doing isn’t recorded for posterity. But there’s little question that for decades to come, anglers who have visited “Snow’s Cut” will remember how big the flounder grew and how good the fishing could be.
Two who won’t likely forget are Rick Bennett, who operates RodMan Charters out of Wrightsville Beach, and Wes Barber of Island Tackle and Hardware in Carolina Beach — two fishermen who have sampled what the Cut has to offer and have come away impressed.
“The Cut is channeled, and my understanding is that it was dynamited when it was built – they blasted it out,” said Bennett (910-799-6120). “You’ve got drops in there where it goes from 10- to 28-feet deep all over the place. There are tree stumps where they blew them out, rocks and all kinds of stuff that have fallen off the banks. There’s a lot of junk in there that flounder can get around.
“You can fish the Cut for a lifetime and not master all the spots. You just fish it and fish it and fish it and learn places where you can catch fish. There are hundreds of places to fish; I haven’t learned them all.”
The spots worth mastering are typically full of flounder for about six months of the year. Fish will start to move into the Cut during late May and remain until October or November before cooling water temperatures push them into the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean off the beach. The peak months are August and September.
The Cut contains a good number of flounder most of the time, drawn by cover that provides them with spots to ambush passing baitfish, flushed though by water currents that converge on the quarter-mile-long canal.
“It’s a key area by the mere fact that the saltwater out of the ocean mixes with the nutrient-rich, brackish water of the Cape Fear River,” Bennett said. “It’s the junction of two water systems; it has a lot of peaks and valleys and structure; and all of that naturally makes it a place where you can catch big flounder.”
How big? Annually, the Cut produces a handful of fish that weigh 10 pounds or better.
“If you’re going to catch a big fish, it will be at the Cut,” said Barber, who has fished the channel for at least 10 years. “There will be some small fish, but if you’re looking for a big fish, that’s where he’ll be.”
Bennett said that’s no surprise. He believes the habitat allows fish to reach a ripe old age before they’re harvested, and the rich waters of the river serve to jump-start the food chain — and everything benefits.
“I honestly think the river has everything to do with the size of the flounder we catch down here,” he said. “The river is why (the whole area) has tremendous fishing — no question. The fish are just bigger.
“The river’s influence is felt well beyond the river, and Snow’s Cut is obviously part of it. And the fishing at Carolina Beach Inlet feeds off the river too. The water out of the river comes through the cut and goes right up to Carolina Beach Inlet and Masonboro Inlet.
“The size minimum is 14 inches (the creel limit is eight fish per day), but I don’t honestly have to measure two or three fish a year. A 16- or 17-inch flounder is about as small as I’m going to have to keep.”
Barber thinks the 2006 flounder season is going to be a great one, if only based on what the Cut has produced this year.
“There have been a lot of fish caught in there already; it’s definitely going to be a good year,” he said. “You can start at one end of the Cut and fish all the way to the other end.”
Most of the fish Bennett and Barber catch will be close to the sharp drop that separates the Cut’s channel — 28- to 30-feet deep at most places — from the shallow, junk-strewn flats. Flounder will move up to the edge of the flats as the water rises then drop back as the tide falls.
To catch them, anglers have to put a bait in front of them, and that means fishing right along the edge of the drop — where a lot of the stumps and rocks and junk dislodged during the Cut’s construction wound up. Flounder will move up, then settle down to the bottom, flattening themselves in the mud and silt bottom, then jetting up to grab a baitfish that swims past them.
“Where it shallows up, it’s pretty drastic,” Barber said. “They’ll get all the way up on top of the ledge where there are of stumps and stickups. It’s about like fishing for (largemouth) bass; you throw up in there and retrieve real slowly.
“Sometimes, I’ll drift along the edge and fish, but it depends on the current. And if I get a real strong bite, I’ll anchor up and fish a place (thoroughly). I’ve caught eight keepers off one spot before.”
Bennett believes the cover and habitat in the Cut is a magnet for bigger flounder.
“No joke — to catch big flounder, you need to go where big flounder live,” he said. “There are places that bigger flounder are known to inhabit. Deeper water usually means bigger flounder. Ledges, rocks, stumps and pilings are all good attractors.
“It’s a hard place to fish because of all the ledges and structure and drops. You don’t go in there with just one rig.”
Bennett almost exclusively anchors up and fishes the Cut, spot by spot. He anchors at the deep end of the flats, within an easy, underhand cast from the drop into the channel.
“Anchoring is the only way to get a good presentation of your bait because the current is usually so fast,” he said. “You stay close to the edge, with your boat on the flat, and you cast out into deeper water and just bring it back up the edge. The top of the ledge is about 10-feet deep, and they’re laying there, looking up. You just work your bait up on the ledge.
“There are no really big flounder in shallow water; it just doesn’t happen. I’ve never caught ’em up on the flats. I’ve anchored in shallow water and caught fish by casting out, but I’ve never caught ’em shallow. They’re always down in a hole or on the side of a ledge.”
Tidal movement dictates how one approaches fishing at the Cut.
“Because it’s a funnel, the tide runs through the Cut very rapidly; you can get a 12-knot current in there,” Bennett said. “When the current is pumping through there hard, it’s about impossible to fish.”
When the tide rises, it rises from the ocean side, with water pouring in through Carolina Beach Inlet, making the mile-and-a-half flow to the mouth of the Cut, then through to the river. When it starts out, water heads in the opposite direction, toward the Atlantic.
Both Barber and Bennett prefer fishing just after the slack, high tide when the water movement is at its ebb.
“I like to fish the falling tide — from about an hour after it’s high,” Barber said. “The flounder will go up in more shallow water on the high tide, and as it starts out, they go back toward deeper water at the ledge.”
Bennett will start a little bit earlier on the tide change, starting an hour or so before high tide and fishing the three-hour window until about two hours after high tide.
“That’s when the water is moving the slowest,” said Bennett, who also likes to find little places that are protected from the current, usually by some kind of natural current break. “The four-hour period in the middle of the tides (rising and falling) is when the water is really running in there. You try to find little eddies and spots where the current isn’t ripping — behind points and outcroppings.”
Bennett said one problem many fishermen have is trying to hurry things too much.
“The one bad thing about the Cut is that you have to be patient. You have to fish very, very slowly,” he said.
When it comes to making flounder bite, live bait is the ticket and sensitive tackle is a key. Barber uses a 6 1/2-foot, light-action Key Largo baitfishing rod matched with an ABU 5600 bait-casting reel spooled with 50-pound Tufline, a braided line. He uses a standard Carolina rig, with a 1- to 1 1/2-ounce egg sinker threaded onto the running line, which is tied to a barrel swivel. The other end of the swivel gets a 16-inch leader of 30-pound-test fluorocarbon, then a No. 1 Eagle Claw 042 live-bait hook.
“I like to use live mullet minnows, 4- to 5-inches long,” Barber said. “You can find some in the Carolina Beach boat basin, but I get most of mine in the dredge pond off the Cape Fear River.”
Bennett uses the same basic Carolina rig, but likes a No. 2 hook, a 6 1/2-foot medium-action spinning rod with a fast, sensitive tip (he’s a custom rod-builder on the side), with a 20-inch leader of 25-pound Berkley Big Game mono and 14/20 Berkley Fireline braid on the reel.
“I like to use a finger mullet (4- to 7-inches long) or a menhaden (4- to 6-inches long),” he said. “The traditional thing about ‘bigger bait, bigger fish’ is not 100-percent accurate, but it’s a good rule of thumb.”
Freshness is next to godliness when it comes to flounder fishing. Bennett said fresh bait is a necessity. A bait that isn’t lively, even if it’s alive, is no better than a dead bait. The only thing worse than a dead bait is no bait at all.
Getting a bite is one thing; hooking the fish is another. That’s the biggest hurdle most novice flounder anglers must overcome.
So many set the hook too quickly and end up reeling in part of a baitfish. Bennett appears to have a sixth sense about when a flatfish has taken the bait, turned it in his mouth to scale it, then moved it to his throat to swallow it. The hookset comes only after the bait has been scaled and moved.
“Sometimes, a big flounder will take a bait and swim away rather that sitting back down (on the bottom) and chomping on it and scaling it,” he said. “You know a bite because it’s a subtle bump-bump, not the machine-gun tapping of a pinfish. That’s when it all stops.
“If you’re fishing with a braid like Fireline, which is very sensitive, sometimes you can feel the fish scaling the bait, then swallowing it.
“When you feel the hit, you drop your rod tip to the water and create some slack. I’ll even open the bail on my reel and release some line, so he can move off 8 or 10 feet. The key is that you don’t want the flounder to know you’re there. I usually count to 50, then take up the slack. He’ll have the bait and hook down his throat by then, and I’ll set the hook.”
Yes, that leads to some deeply-hooked flounder, Bennett said, but he hasn’t run into too many fishermen that are interested in catch-and-release fishing for flounder. Most of the time after the fish is netted, it’s headed for flour, hot grease and a frying pan.
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