Singing the Blues

The upcoming bluefish run around Masonboro Inlet is a great attraction for anglers.

David Franklin of Carolina Beach was heading out of Masonboro Inlet for an evening of fishing for speckled trout, red drum, flounder — or anything else that would bite. As his boat cruised past the southern rock jetty, he saw a flock of pelicans, gulls and terns circling, hovering, then diving into the water.
“Look beneath those birds,” he said. “Something’s eating menhaden, driving them to the surface. The birds have easy pickings.”

The water was alive with bluefish. They were slashing at the baitfish, while the gulls picked them and pelican pouched them.

Franklin moved closer, clutching a cast net. He waited until he spotted a mass of menhaden milling in a circle — a defensive posture, instinctive but ineffectual at escaping the marauding predators. When he saw no bluefish in the school, he tossed the net, and the silvery donut of fish circled tighter and tighter, engulfed by the net as it floated it upward while it closed.

After filling the live well with “pogies” about four to six inches long, Franklin anchored along a steep drop-off that was readily visible to the naked eye in the clear water. By the time the anchor line came taut, with the stern facing the south jetty on the falling tide, he had impaled a twitching baitfish through the nostrils. Scanning the water for swirls of feeding bluefish, he cast the baitfish against the rock wall.

The menhaden didn’t make it to the bottom before a tell-tale tug telegraphed a strike. He reeled in the head of the baitfish, then baited up again with the same result.

“Small bluefish will do that,” he said. “A big one usually eats head and all when a baitfish is that small. You never know with fall-run bluefish. They could be 1- or 2-pounders or a school of middleweights. A good bluefish for this time of year is about five pounds.”

Franklin changed the hook placement, impaling the baitfish at the tail, near the anal fin. He added a couple of split shot to the line ahead of the wire leader.

“If you hook the bait in the tail, it tries to swim to the surface,” he said. “The weight of the wire and hook won’t lead it to the bottom like it does when the hook is in the nose. I add split shot until the sink time is right. That depends on the current velocity, depth of the water, and the depth of the bluefish school. Sometimes they strike as the bait hits the water, or sometimes as it rides along the bottom. Usually, they hit it somewhere in the middle.”

From the moment he adjusted his hook placement, Franklin was “in the fish.” Every cast resulted in a hook-up. His baitcasting rod regularly bent double, and most of the bluefish jumped several times.

“Bluefish have every quality a gamefish should have,” Franklin said. “They are aggressive biters and will hit anything you throw at them. They fight hard all the way to the boat, and they even give you a show when they jump. They have stamina you wouldn’t believe, even after all that jumping around. A bluefish even jumps around in the boat.”

Franklin had a fish on the floor of the boat that he pinned down with the sole of his shoe before removing the hook with pliers and tossing the fish into the ice chest with a dozen others.

“I don’t use a net with small bluefish,” he said. “Their teeth can wreck a light monofilament net. If the hook pulls as I lift one, it’s just an early release. When you’re on a really good school of fall bluefish like this one, you’re going to head home with all you can eat.”

John “Tex” Grissom, who operates Tex’s Tackle in Wrightsville Beach, is not surprised that local fishermen are rediscovering bluefish.

“All of my customers who moved down from the North think bluefish are some of the best-eating fish — and they’re right,” Grissom said. “When they show up in the fall, I love to see it happen.”

Grissom’s store is closed on Mondays so he can go fishing. It’s no wonder, because the waters around Masonboro Inlet have less than 10 percent of the boat traffic during the week as on weekends. Bluefish, like any other fish, have only so much tolerance for boat traffic.

“You want to find a school you can fish all by yourself, or maybe with one or two other boats with anglers who know what they’re doing,” Grissom said. “I troll for them sometimes, using spoons, but I really prefer casting to them. Trolling is counterproductive if you find a school really pounding the pogies on top.”

Grissom gets to experiment with different lures since so many come across his desk in the tackle shop. He said he develops a preference for certain ones so he can speak to his customers with confidence. One of his favorites is the metal jig.

“I’ve seen a revolution in what we call casting jigs,” he said. “It’s a heavy like a spoon, so it casts well, but you can also yo-yo it like a jig. The current favorite is the Maria Jig. We call it the ‘magic jig.’ It has a shiny finish that makes it look just like a baitfish. It’s heavy enough to cast a mile, and a bluefish, Spanish or any other schooling fish can’t stand for it to be in the same water with them.”

Grissom uses several other spoons and jigs for catching bluefish, and he also enjoys catching bluefish with topwater lures.

“If you spot a school of bluefish on top with the birds diving down into them, a topwater lure is hard to beat,” he said, “but you have to be careful not to hook a bird, because they may eat a topwater lure, too.”

Grissom prefers “walk-the-dog” styles of lures. He said shiny lures work best, but color really doesn’t mater if the bluefish are hungry and the lure is splashing along.

“You can’t work a topwater lure fast enough to keep it away from a bluefish,” he said. “The faster you work it, the better they like it. A bluefish will follow a topwater lure all the way to the boat, along with a couple or 12 of his buddies. It’s not unusual to hook a bluefish, then a second one with the same lure if it has multiple hooks. The second fish is trying to take it away from the first one. You won’t usually land them both, because at least one will tear free.”

Grissom doesn’t use wire leaders with castding lures. He fishes a spinning or baitcasting outfit spooled with 10-pound braid or mono, then ties it to a 2-foot leader of 20- to 30-pound fluorocarbon.

“I feel the fluorocarbon leader between fish,” he said. “If it gets too abraded, I cut it off and re-tie. Starting out with a long leader is a good idea, because at the end of a busy evening, you may have had to retie several times.”

Grissom looks for visible signs of bluefish, including fish, baitfish and birds, but certain places are more likely than other to hold bluefish.

“The tideline is always a good place to look for bluefish,” he said. “The tideline is most distinct on a falling tide. The water changes colors sharply, and the contrast is like a wall that concentrates fish and baitfish. Other times, I head up or down the beach from the inlet. Schools of bluefish are always within a mile of the beach. I’ve caught them by idling along while casting a jig right into the breakers, where a surf fisherman could easily reach them with a cast.”

While he’s looking for fish, Grissom often trolls with a plug or spoon to locate fish beneath the surface. He uses Clark Spoons and Yo-Zuri deep divers for trolling.

“But if the fish are right in the inlet, munching on menhaden, I sometimes resort to feeding them a live bait,” he said. “When I head out the inlet, I always look for bluefish. I fish for dolphin, king mackerel, Spanish and everything else in the ocean, but I’m not going to pass up bluefish.

“I’ve heard some anglers say bluefish are their fallback fish — the fish they catch when nothing else is biting. But I say my favorite fish is whatever is jumping and pulling on the end of my line.”