Walk the Puppy

It’s a moveable feast for red drum and inshore topwater anglers at the central N.C. coast during November when mullet schools begin to travel.

When autumn arrives, North Carolina’s coastal backwaters fill with baitfish.

Mullet are swimming everywhere, forming huge schools in grass beds and near creek mouths. As the shiny baitfish swim in massive abandon, gamefish crash this moveable feast, breaking the surface as they crush hapless baitfish leaping from the water while attempting to escape.

While fish mostly swim, anglers call this excessive display of nature’s abundance the mullet “run.” And they really are running — to escape the hungry jaws of speckled trout, red drum and flounder.

Anglers know this fact and look forward to the fall and early winter as perhaps the best time of year for inshore fishing — as long as the weather is warm and the mullet are running until the winter’s chilly weather forces them to warmer waters.

“There’s a school of mullet now,“ said Capt. Rick Patterson of Cape Crusader Charters. “There’s probably a puppy drum right behind them.”

Patterson cast a floating lure behind a school of mullet cruising near a grassy bank. He began retrieving the lure with a simultaneous reeling and twitching motion, which imparted a flip-flopping action. Most anglers call this type of lure retrieve the “walk-the-dog” approach.

But Patterson’s dog didn’t walk far. After a couple of twitches, an enormous hole opened in the salty marsh water, engulfing the topwater lure like a whirlpool.

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