Transition Tricks

April can be tough on Cape Lookout anglers targeting puppy drum — unless you take these experts’ advice.

The calendar said it was springtime, but with the wind whipping out of the north and whitecaps in Beaufort Inlet said otherwise. Back in the Newport River marshes, however, with the surface of the water barely rippled, Dave Dietzler was directing traffic.

“Cast to that little point right there — there are oysters off the end,” he advised the fisherman standing beside him on the casting deck. “Work that stretch of bank over there. The fish have been using it the last week or so.”

Every cast was right where Dietzler wanted it, expertly placed a foot short of the marsh bank in question or a foot or so past the oysters visible just under the surface on the point. It didn’t take long before the fisherman was tight to a puppy drum.

The other three anglers in Dietzler’s boat cheered as Patrick Sebile, the founder of Sebile Lures, wrestled with the fish, which eventually tired and came to the net. Twenty-three beautiful inches of copper muscle, with the treble hook on one of Sebile’s lures securely in the corner of its mouth.

It’s a scene that Dietzler has gotten used to after years of running Cape Lookout Charters, but it’s one he’s never tired of. And with the outlook for the red drum population promising, it’s one he expects to see more and more in the waters of the Cape Lookout area: Morehead City, Atlantic Beach and Beaufort.

“There are so many fish and so many places,” he said. “As more people are fishing, they’re spreading out and fishing more places and finding fish. I don’t think you’ll have to just fish points anymore; there are fish really spread out, all around.”

And in April, that goes double.

Dietzler and Chris Elliott of Crystal Coast Charters agree that April is a half-and-half month. Sure, the weather is warming, but it’s not warm enough. Then again, it’s too warm for winter. Like fishermen, the puppy drum are stuck in the middle.

“Here, March is pretty much a winter month,” said Elliott, a former pro bass fisherman. “April is when the water starts to warm up and starts to turn. We start to get better days more consistently. The warmer it gets, the better it gets — but it’s not there yet.”

“April can be a forgiving or not-forgiving month,” Dietzler echoed.

So fishing can be tough. And when it is, most guides resort to a time-tested strategy.

Fish hard and cover as much water as you can.

“In the winter, when the water is clear, you can go somewhere and see big schools of fish,” Elliott said. “By April, they’re starting to break up, you’re starting to get stained water, and you wind up maybe scrambling around, fishing a bunch of places.

“I’d fish all my stuff — the Haystacks, the Newport River marshes — and there are a lot of fish in Core Creek going back toward the Neuse River.”

This spring could be an interesting one, with a number of fish having moved out of the backwaters into the ocean during the extremely cold weather of early to mid-January. They left when the water temperatures dropped into ranges below their comfort zone, heading to the ocean where the water was a few degrees warmer and were deeper water could provide refuge.

As the water warms this month, those fish will be moving back into Beaufort Inlet and into the backwaters, adding to the number of puppy drum who hung around through the winter.

“We had some fish move out, but we never got as cold as it did up toward Hatteras and Oregon Inlet. Most everything stayed inside all winter,” Dieztler said. “The ones that left, they’ll be moving back in.”

Dietzler said that despite the often-windy April weather, finding a protected place to fish isn’t that difficult.

“If you have a hard wind, the way our islands and sounds are set up, there’s always a place you can fish where you’re in the lee,” he said. “You may only have one bank to fish, so you’d better really work it hard.”

As inconsistent as the weather may be, fish behavior may be a match. Dietzler said that when we finds puppy drum in large schools — it will be May before they really split up — the fish in that school may be hungry one day and disinterested the next, even in the same general area on the same tidal stage.

“Some days, you run into a happy school that you can do anything around,” he said. “Then you find them and you stay around them for 30 minutes and throw every bait in your boat and it doesn’t matter; they’ll check it out, but they won’t touch it.

“Typically, what we see are really tight schools, because the fish understand that if they stay tight, there’s less chance of them winding up dead from the porpoises.

“It helps you stay on fish when they’re acting like that. You’ll find ’em in the same places on the same tides every day. They’ll be within 300 yards of the same area; some days they’re right on the bank, and some days they’re 25 yards off it. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason. I try to keep my eyes out for birds picking, bait that’s spooked out of the water, that kind of thing.

“They’re roaming and milling around; they tend to stay in the same neighborhood. If I don’t catch ’em one day, it doesn’t mean they’re not there — they just don’t eat 24/7. So I’ll try to rotate my spots.

“In the sounds — Core, Back and Bogue — as long as the water is clear, you can just about sight-fish year-round. You get back in some of the rivers and creeks and the water clarity drops. Obviously, you pay attention to water clarity. I’ll fish light colors — clears and smokes — in clear water and darker colors like olives and browns, blacks and chartreuses, in stained water.

Dietzler has marveled for years at the quality of puppy drum in the Cape Lookout area. There’s the usual showing of big, bull reds that easily exceed North Carolina’s 18- to 27-inch slot limit, but fish that are small enough to be protected by the lower end of the slot are downright uncommon.

“In Carteret County, if I catch 15 fish a year that are under 15 inches long, that’s a lot,” he said. “We don’t seem to catch a lot of fish under the slot; the majority are 2½ to 4½ years old. I don’t know if they push down this way after they get bigger or what. I know Core Creek seems to be a place where you can catch some really nice fish. It seems like it’s a nursery area for bigger fish.”

Because puppy drum can be a tad lethargic, and picky, Elliott said he tends to fish a lot of scented baits in April. He likes to fish cut bait on a Carolina rig or split-shot rig, working it slowly and letting it rest on the bottom and attract fish. He also likes to fish the heavily-scented Gulp! line of plastics.

“I know you can catch ’em on topwaters and curlytails and all, but it just seems to me like cut bait will work better this time of year,” he said. “And you still have to fish slowly. There may be some days where it warms up and they’ll want to eat a little more, but I stick with fishing slowly.”

Dietzler rarely fishes anything but artificials, and in early spring, he opts for baits that have less built-in action. “I’ll fish baits with a flat tail or a paddletail. I’ll fish them around rocks or the edge of the grass on a jighead or a Texas rig and a 3/0 hook. You can even add a split shot about six inches up the line,” he said.