Southern Spectacular

The creeks at Bald Head Island offer great fall speckled trout fishing.

The float slowly drifted into the growing current riffle off the stern of Capt. Andy Fisher’s boat and promptly disappeared.Reacting quickly, Fisher leaned back on the rod and drove the points of the small treble hook into the trout’s mouth. An excellent sounding “zzzrt-zzzrt” came from the reel as the trout felt the sting of the hook and tried to put some distance between itself and its discomfort.

“I believe this might be a little better fish than what we’ve been catching,” Fisher said with obvious excitement in his voice. “I don’t know if it’ll break 5 pounds, but it took a little more line that those others and it took it a bit faster too.”

Fisher worked the speckled trout back toward the boat and after several minutes it appeared tired enough to land. But the fish found another burst of energy when it saw the landing net. Its sprint was short and a final gasp at escape, but this time Fisher led the speck into the waiting landing net and scooped it out of the water and into the boat.

“Man, I was hoping to get a 5-pounder today, but I believe we’ll have to keep trying,” Fisher said in happy and slightly disappointed tones. “This one is better than 4 (pounds), but it won’t make 5. Get your bait over by this riffle and let’s see what you can do.”

Following his directions, I cast my float and shrimp to the edge of the little rip and began slowly feeding out line to allow them to drift with the current. At about 25 yards behind the boat, the float paused a second and twitched slightly up current.

“Get ready, there he is,” Fisher said excitedly. “That pause and slight upstream dart was your shrimp seeing the trout and trying to get away …”

He didn’t get to finish his thought as a speck unceremoniously jerked the float underneath the surface. One second it was there, then it had disappeared so fast we had to look the second time to be sure.

Fisher tried to coach my hookset, but the reflexes of many fishing years got the better of me; heck, it might even be genetic.

In my family when a float goes underwater, the angler jerks the rod tip, sort of like breathing (you don’t think about it, you just do it).

Feeling the bite of the hook the trout surged into the current and used the tide’s pull to run to the center of the creek. This time that sound of line being tugged from the reel was coming from my reel and it sounded good.

That was this trout’s only real run, but it fought steadily all the way to the boat. As he slipped the net under it and hoisted it into the boat, Fisher said the speck was a 3-pounder, or maybe slightly larger, but definitely a nice fish.

After removing the hook, Fisher stepped forward to add the spotted seatrout to the keepers in our cooler. He paused as he opened the lid.

“From the looks of the fish in this cooler, this month’s recipe is probably going to be about speckled trout,” he said. “I’ll be invited to sample the recipe, won’t I?”

The action this morning was in the marshes and creeks near Southport and behind Oak Island.

Capt. Andy Fisher (Go Fish Guide Service, 910-278-7141) works the lower Cape Fear River, its mainland creeks, the Elizabeth River and its creeks, the creeks and bays behind Bald Head Island, Davis Creek, Davis Canal, Lockwoods Folly River and Lockwoods Folly Inlet. With access and knowledge of this much water, he can usually find somewhere the fish are gathered and hungry.

Fisher has a Contender center console and a Lost Bay Skiff, both powered by Yamaha four-stroke outboards. This morning we were in the skiff to run the skinny waters of the Elizabeth River and creeks behind Bald Head. The water in the Elizabeth River was stained well from a recent hard rainfall, so Fisher decided to delay fishing there until the tide began to rise again and brought cleaner ocean water.

So we had headed across the Cape Fear River to the creeks behind Bald Head where rainwater runoff wasn’t as significant a factor.

As we pulled into the first spot to anchor, Fisher directed me to run the boat as he went forward to place the anchor. While a Danforth-style anchor complete with a chain is the norm and he said he also had one, Fisher lifted an older rubber-covered Navy-style anchor, tied directly to the rope. At his command, I shifted the motor into neutral and he eased the anchor over the side where it took hold immediately. Then Fisher adjusted the anchor line length to put us in position to fish this particular spot.

Fisher said he began using the Navy-style anchor many years ago and found it did an excellent job at softer bottoms and in lighter current with hard bottoms. The rubber coating reduces noise from moving the anchor in the boat and it holds in most places without the chain, which also tends to make lots of noise just when anglers are trying to be really quiet.

As the boat swung in the current into position, he turned the steering wheel to use the motor as a rudder and fine tune our location to be just where he wanted.

Once he was satisfied with our positioning, Fisher removed an outfit consisting of a Bass Pro Shops Trigger Rod and smaller left-handed Abu Garcia 5601 Ambassador Reel from the rod rack. He adjusted the bobber-stopper so the bait would be about 6-feet deep. After hooking a shrimp under its horn with one barb of a small red Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp treble hook, he passed the outfit to me.

“They should be somewhere between the grass along the bank and this tide eddy easing by the boat,” he said. “This spot is fairly deep, and I believe I adjusted your float so your bait will be far enough off the bottom it won’t attract every pinfish, yet still low enough for the trout to see it.

“I thought we would start with shrimp, as everything likes shrimp. If we catch a few larger trout, we’ll switch to mullet minnows and try to catch a really big one.

“Really big trout tend to eat mullets, croakers, even pinfish in sizes too large for the more competitive smaller fish. You won’t get as many strikes with the larger baits, but when you do, it’s usually a nice trout or a drum. And there are some nice drum in here at times.”

Fisher said to cast the bait to the distance off the bank you wanted to fish and leave the reel out of gear and slowly let out line so the bait and float drift with the current. He said this tactic was the reason he uses left-hand conventional reels.

Conventional reels are much easier than spinners to control the line pulling off for a drift. The reason he uses left-hand reels is so anglers can hold the rod in their right hand, which is natural for most people, and not have to switch the rod to the left hand to reel.

Getting used to a left-hand reel setup was a little awkward, but after a few minutes it seemed natural. Most right-handed people use left-handed spinning reels but switch back for right-handed conventional reels. That’s fine for trolling but means having to switch hands to cast.

“Before you get your first strike, let me remind you, you have to turn the reel handle to put the reel back in gear to set the hook,” Fisher said. “The only other way is to hold your thumb down on the spool to stop the free spool, but you have to reel sometime to get the fish in, so just a quick forward turn of the handle will pop it in gear and engage the drag.”

Fisher’s reels were filled with Stren small-diameter, braided line. He said the braid has no stretch, which allows for quicker hooksets but required the drag be set low to prevent pulling hooks out of a speck’s mouth.

“Speckled trout have very soft mouths and tear easily,” Fisher said. “These small hooks tend to grab something when one hits, but it’s not always a great hookup. I have to keep the drag very light to help prevent pulling the hooks.”

Before our trip ended, we both lost a harder-running, longer-fighting and possibly larger fish to hooks that pulled free several minutes into the fight. Fisher said this was usually caused by some combination of a poor hookup, the lack of stretch in the line, and the soft mouth of the trout.

Fisher’s rig begins with an unweighted 10-inch Lindy Little Joe Pole Float, which appears rather large for suspending a shrimp or finger mullet but works well. He said the cigar-like shape of the float allows it to pull through the water with less resistance than the cup of a popping cork, and they’re easier on the baitfish and angler. A primary reason for using them was the ability to see these floats at a distance. Fisher often drifts a bait well down a current edge trying to locate trout.

The remainder of Fisher’s rig is a 15- to 18-inch section of 12-pound fluorocarbon line for the leader, a red Size 8 Eagle Claw Lazer Sharp 934 Series treble hook, a Size 10 barrel swivel, a 1-ounce egg sinker, a small bead, several large beads, and a bobber-stopper.

The hook is tied to one end of the fluorocarbon and one eye of the swivel to the other. The bobber-stopper is put on the line to the reel, then a small bead, a large bead, the float, a large bead, and an egg sinker, a large bead. The main line is tied to the other eye of the swivel.

In simplest terms, this setup is a Carolina rig underneath a float. The sinker holds the float upright and the bobber-stopper allows for adjusting fishing depths. The beads are to protect the knots and line from chafing on the edges of the egg sinker and float. The float will slide down the line to the egg sinker for casting then slide back up to the depth where the bobber-stopper is set.

Fisher said when he first began using this rig, he used a weighted float and kept the bait down with a split shot or two. He said this technique worked well for fishing as long as the setup didn’t tangle during the cast. The weighted float always sat upright in the water, but the angler might be fishing with a tangled rig that never attracted a strike.

“I switched to my current setup with the unweighted float, because you can tell if it’s tangled or not,” Fisher said. “If the rig gets tangled on the cast, the float lays on its side and never sits upright. The only other time it does this is when you cast into water shallower than it’s adjusted to fish. So you need to reel it in and check it.

“This isn’t quite fool proof, but it’s correct better than 90 per cent of the time.

“If the cork is upright, the rig is straight and you’re fishing correctly; if it isn’t, the rig is tangled.”

On this day the trout preferred shrimp, but Fisher said that isn’t always the case. As the water cools, they generally become fonder of mullet minnows. In cold water sometimes specks prefer mud minnows.

Fisher lives near the water and usually has baits in holding pens and ready to go. He said sometimes having the right baits was a bigger challenge than locating fish, especially late in the fall and early in the spring.

After returning we had plenty of fish to clean. We didn’t keep two limits even though we caught legal specks.

“The fish are biting and there are some nice ones here,” Fisher said. “Let’s release any barely legal ones that are hooked lightly we don’t have to handle.”

We only had one barely legal trout in our bag, and it had been hooked deeply and didn’t appear to be likely to survive. The fish cleaned easily and made quite a good “mess” (if you aren’t from eastern N.C., you might not know the definition of a “mess o’ fish,” but it’s basically enough fish for one big meal.)

A good recipe is featured near the back of this issue in the “Cooking on the Wild Side” column.

Fisher enjoyed the meal as much as I enjoyed the trip to catch speckled trout.