On September 17, Malcolm Condie, of Broad Creek, enjoyed a day of fishing from Sea View Pier at North Topsail that he won’t soon forget.
Condie, a bakery production manager, is a season pass holder at the pier and tries to fish every Wednesday. This one started out like many others, but had quite a different ending.
After catching some mullet early in the morning, Condie set his king rig off the middle of the tee at the pier’s end and began waiting for a king strike. It was a long time until 12:30, when the hit came and things began happening.
“It didn’t take off like a king,” Condie said. “It headed to the east instead of offshore and wasn’t running quite fast enough. At about 300 yards up the beach it paused and jumped, but it didn’t do a classic tarpon tailwalking. It was just a jump that didn’t clear the water and no one got a good enough view of it to tell what it was. We were thinking it was probably a big blacktip shark, but knew it might be a tarpon, so I decided to play it like a real fish until we could see what it was.”
In the next few minutes it jumped a few more times, but was never at a good angle to be identified, so Condie stayed with his plan. About 45 minutes into the fight, Condie and friends good a good enough look to realize it was a tarpon. He had fought several before and never landed one, so he decided to see if he could get this one in.
“Once we got it close to the surf, I ran the rest of the way up the pier, jumped down on the beach and ran back to the water’s edge,” Condie continued. “The folks handling the gaff lines passed them down to me and I walked out in the surf and led him in to the beach. At that point folks came down and helped me drag him up on the sand.”
Condie said he backed his truck up to the access beside the pier and four men helped him drag the fish up and load it into his truck. He was told East Coast Sports in Surf City was the place to weigh it, so he headed there to see what the big fish weighed.
Condie’s big fish weighed 193 pounds. It was 89 inches long (tail length) and had a 42 inch girth. The best news was it weighed 18 pounds more than the current state record (175 pounds) held by Jesse Lockowitz of Cape Carteret and caught on Bogue Inlet Pier in 2005. That is when a day that was already really good got even better.
In a unique case of being in the right place at the right time, Condie said Bruce Ungar, who works on tarpon projects with the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami (www.rsmas.miami.edu), was in Atlantic Beach and heard about Condie’s catch. Condie had planned to donate the tarpon to the N.C. Aquarium at Pine Knoll Shores to be used to feed their fish, but Ungar tracked him down and asked for it for research.
More details of Condie’s record catch and the research planned for it will be in the November issue of North Carolina Sportsman, which will be mailed and delivered to newsstands the third week of October.
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