Wahoo Fever

A Cape Carteret fishing team is smitten by giant fall game fish after landing a 94-pounder.

Chesson O’Briant works as a sales manager at his family’s business, Emerald Marine Boat Sales and Service at Cape Carteret.

For better or for worse, the fact is that having a boat business with an ocean so close at hand nearby lured him away from an upstate college before he completed the courses needed for graduation. Now 25, he’s an accomplished king mackerel fisherman — or make that was an accomplished king mackerel fisherman.

Now that he and his teammate, Capt. Rob Koraly, have landed what many describe as a “turbo-charged king” or a “king mackerel on steroids,” they’re switching tactics in the fall to intentionally target wahoo, using some of the light-tackle techniques most anglers reserve for catching kings.

“We were fishing on my boat, Emerald Marine, last October during the 2006 Topsail Offshore Fishing Club King Mackerel Tournament,” O’Briant said. “We were fishing at the east side of Cape Lookout.

“We’d put in at 5:15 a.m. at Island Harbor Marina at Emerald Isle where I keep my boat. There was no need for us to waste any time catching bait because we already had menhaden in our pen. So we started running down the ditch (Intracoastal Waterway) to Beaufort Inlet then went across the shoals on the east side of Cape Lookout.”

The two-angler team began fishing at the 1700 Rock, a hard-bottom area between 7 and 9 miles offshore of Cape Lookout. O’Briant said some big king mackerel had been caught at the area. Several other boats were working the area near the rock.

O’Briant’s boat is a 29-foot center console Century with twin Yamaha four-stroke engines, a fairly standard machine for king mackerel tournament fishing. But any time seas exceed 3 feet, slow trolling using live menhaden as baits can become difficult, making tournament anglers resort to other techniques to get baits in front of fish.

“It was blowing hard, so we set up a drift instead of slow-trolling and had one king on the line,” O’Briant said. “Then we turned around to drift the same spot and hooked an Atlantic sharpnose shark. When we nosed the boat into the wind and were moving at a slower speed, another line took off.”

Koraly grabbed the rod from the holder and began fighting the fish on routine king mackerel live-bait tournament fishing gear (a Penn 545 GS reel with 20-pound test monofilament on a Penn live-bait rod).

“I was at the helm, and we were just tossing the shark overboard when the rod started bending over,” O’Briant said. “The shark was still in the air while the fish on the line was going perpendicular to the boat; the reel wasn’t even screaming yet.”

Then the fish sped away, taking 300 to 350 yards of line from the reel before O’Briant could get the boat moving in the direction of the fish. Fortunately, it ran at approximately 2:30 on the clock face, relative to the bow. It was just about the same direction the anglers would have to run to catch up to the fish, allowing them to clear the rods from behind while the boat was running without tangling lines.

Within 30 seconds the fish had pulled most of the line off the reel. Koraly headed to the bow to begin the battle. In
4-foot seas, it was difficult for O’Briant to chase down the fish while keeping the angler from bouncing around in the bow.

“The reel was making a scream like I’ve never heard from a king mackerel reel,” O’Briant said. “It was a steady run until we had less than 100 yards of line left.”

Once the boat was moving, the fish continued to move, but Koraly was gaining line as the boat began to catch up with whatever was trying to melt the spool.

Koraly is a 24-year-old Inshore Charter captain who operates Sandbar Safari Guide Service out of Cape Carteret. He fishes his 21-foot Bayliner for king and Spanish mackerels, flounders, speckled trout and sheepshead. But he also fishes with O’Briant during king tournaments. They started fishing the SKA circuit the last couple of seasons.

“As we were chasing the fish, it was still running,” Koraly said. “The way it hit and took off, we figured it was a big king — big enough to win the tournament.

“We started chasing it down, and I knew it was a large animal. In my head I thought it had to be a 50-pound king. But once we chased it down and got up and down with it, I couldn’t gain line. It took us 20 minutes to get up and down with the fish and another 25 minutes to get it up to the boat. I was only gaining a half-inch at a time.

“By that time I thought it had to be an 80-pound amberjack or something else because it was just too heavy to be a king. When I finally saw the fish, the first thing I noticed was the forked tail. For an instant, I thought it was a king again. Then I saw it was the wahoo of a lifetime.

“Even though we were fishing a tournament, I was happy to see it. At least it told us our tournament gear was up to catching a big king.”

The king mackerel rig was in fairly good shape, hooked across the fish’s mouth from the outer gill plate on one side, thorough the mouth and in the corner of the mouth on the other side. The No. 2 wire was light for wahoo fishing (the hooks holding the fish were equally light No. 6 trebles).

“It only took us about 50 minutes to land the fish,” O’Briant said. “We followed her around running both motors at about 1200 to 1300 rpm just to keep up until she wasn’t taking any more line.

“I heard of some other guys down toward Wrightsville Beach who caught one that size, and it took them four hours to land it. We gaffed it and grabbed the tail so we could pull the fish over the side and onto the deck. We guessed she weighed over 60 pounds, but she barely fit in the floor box, and we didn’t take a look at her the rest of the day.

“Other guys were catching wahoo in the same area, so we moved to another spot and caught a 20-pound king, which we later weighed in at the tournament scales. After weighing in the king, we weighed the wahoo, and she weighed 94.15 pounds. We had underestimated the weight by more than 20 pounds.

“Rob got a citation for catching the fish because the citation weight is only 40 pounds.”

O’Briant said big wahoo always show up at the same time and same spot in the fall. He said when the current stacks up in October, lots of wahoo weighing 40 to 60 pounds or more appear east of Cape Lookout to feed on baitfish schools moving closer to shore.

The wahoo Koraly landed was hooked in 80 feet of water. But the two anglers said they have seen them caught in water depths as shallow as 40 feet.

“I’ve caught them within 8 miles of the beach several times before,” Koraly said. “When the water temperature is in the high 60s to low 70s, anywhere the bait is stacked up, the big girls become residential; they stay right there until the bait leaves.

“The shallow water is what helped us catch that big wahoo. After we were right on top of her, she could only head so deep.

“Once you get on top of a fish like that, all the fight is going to be up and down. Out there, along the break, they have all the water depth in the world to work with, so it’s harder to catch them on light tackle because it takes much longer.”

Other spots Koraly said the wahoo appear at the east of Cape Lookout include the Atlas Tanker, Far East Tanker and Chicken Rock.

When Koraly cut open his big 94.15-pounder, it was evident the fish had eaten three false albacore, which were still in her stomach. The big fish was obviously feeding on some equally big baitfish.

“That told us if you want to catch a wahoo, throw some jigs and catch some false albacore to use for trolling baits or use another big baitfish like a big ballyhoo,” Koraly said. “But if you can get some big live baits like menhaden, obviously they’ll work, too.”

Indeed, the pair were using a tandem rig with two large live menhaden when they caught their big wahoo. It was a double-pogie rig, consisting of a 1/0 nose hook, followed by two treble hooks tied about 10 inches apart. The rig was tied with lighter wire leader than O’Briant said he would use when he is specifically targeting wahoo.

“With kings, you go as light as you can,” he said. “But we will be upsizing the wire leader to 40-pound test and the hooks to a 2/0 nose hook and No. 2 treble hooks for wahoo.

“You don’t want to have to fight them too long and have the risk of the hooks pulling. The other thing we’ll do is add about 20 to 30 feet of 40-pound fluorocarbon leader ahead of the wire leader with a uni-knot connection to the main line and an 80-pound Spro swivel tied to the wire leader.

“I think anything you do to minimize visibility will result in more strikes, although you see lots of wahoo caught by anglers using heavy wire leaders and wire lines. The heavier rig is better for wahoo because you can put a lot more pressure on it than on a king mackerel tournament rig.

“When we landed the big wahoo, we fought her so long she’d lost all her color. There were no stripes and all we saw was a giant, white, shiny belly that made us think for a moment she was a huge king.

“You don’t want to play a wahoo for that long if you can help it. If you’re fishing for wahoo, you can catch more fish with something heavier than a king rig because you can use a heavier drag and fish with more confidence that the hooks are going to hold and the leader isn’t going to break.”

O’Briant said other potential baits include rigged Spanish mackerel, bluefish and bonito and ballyhoo. A mullet would also work well — if anglers could find one.

“You can use the up-sized version of a king rig with live menhaden or mullet, or you can use a trolling head with a rigged bait for catching wahoo,” O’Briant said. “To get the bait down to where you see the fish holding on the depth-finder, we use planer and a rubber band rig. You tie the rubber band around the line then tie it to a paper clip. The paper clip slides down the planer line to the depth you want to run the bait.

“I run a 200-pound superbraid for my planer line. When a fish hits, the rubber band breaks, and you can fight the fish on the light tackle instead of on wire line like a lot of trolling anglers use. It’s more fun to catch wahoo with light tackle.”

Instead of using king mackerel rods and reels, O’Briant said he’d use Penn International 30 reels and 30-pound class rods for light-tackle wahoo fishing.

He said there’s no sense wearing out king mackerel tournament gear with a fish that can tip 100 pounds.

“When we first caught that big one, I thought, man, it’s a wahoo.” O’Briant said. “We had wasted all that time catching her during a king tournament and at first I was disappointed. Then, I perked up and thought again, ‘Oh man; it’s a big wahoo.’

“I’m happy now we caught the fish, even if it did waste some tournament fishing time.

“A wahoo that big is the fish of a lifetime, especially since she was landed with such light tackle.”