Finding a new fishing hole by accident is the best

Beaufort guide finds a new hot spot

Stumbling into a great fishing hole when you’re not even looking is always a treat, and guide Danny Rourk of Tailwind Charters in Beaufort fell into one this past week.

Rourk was idling about 50 yards off the shoreline of Parris Island – sorry, we’re not telling you where – getting ready to punch the throttle and head for a spot where he wanted to start the day fishing for redfish.

But with a negative-low tide working, he looked toward a little pocket and saw what he and a visitor to his boat thought was the tide washing over an oyster rack he never knew was there.

“I never fish this spot, never even stop and look at it,” Rourk said.

That admission came right after the oyster rack was revealed to actually be the backs of a pod of redfish pushing along in about six inches of water.

It didn’t take long for live mud minnows and soft-plastics to hit the water, and within a half-hour, Rourk’s “discovery” had produced a half-dozen slot-sized redfish and a 19-inch speckled trout that crushed his offering of a Top Dog Jr., aimed at a particularly shallow redfish.

Rourk had hardly seen a trout all spring, hoping against hope that the extremely cold snap this past January hadn’t been fatal to a majority of the temperature-sensitive specks, so the fish was a welcome sight.

But most of the action this spring has been on reds. Rourk said schools of fish have been fairly predictable on most stages of the tide, and on days when his parties didn’t want to cruise and sight-cast to cobia in the Broad River, reds were a great alternative.