Lots of fishermen ignore the Intracoastal Waterway when they go fishing. After all, who wants to get battered by boat wakes from “snow birds” heading back up north in their yachts when you’ve got so much beautiful, sheltered marsh to fish?
Rob Beglin of Pawley’s Island was probably asking himself what he was doing in the ICW near McClellanville this past week, getting more and more frustrated as a pod of cruising, feeding redfish continued to ignore his artificial offerings.
But finally, he slung a Redfish Magic spinnerbait right in one’s path, and the fish rushed over and crushed it. Five minutes later, he was removing it from the mouth of a 28-inch redfish. It didn’t take long before he repeated the cast-catch-and-release trick on another red, this one a sliver longer than 27 inches.
“A lot of people won’t fish the waterway, but there are fish that never leave it,” said Beglin, a redfish pro who fished the now-defunct FLW Redfish Cup and is fishing an IFA redfish event this weekend in North Carolina. “I like fishing the waterway because you know the fish are always gonna be there – but you go into the (Bulls) Bay, and they’re just so much more aggressive.
“Waterway fish are a lot spookier, probably from the pressure they get,” he said. “It’s like they’ve always got their guard up.”
Beglin boated around eight reds on a half-day trip to the ICW and Bulls Bay, the two biggest coming from the ICW and the rest ranging from 21 to 25 inches. All of them hit Redfish Magic spinnerbaits he fished with a white curlytail trailer.
“I found a couple of big schools of reds down here,” said Beglin, who fished the Bulls Bay end of the marsh because a southwest wind had dirtied up the water in the Cape Romain marshes.
A nice, 19-inch speckled trout that hit a soft-plastic swim bait brightened Beglin’s day considerably. He admitted only catching two specks all spring and worries that the cold winter may have negatively affected the trout population far more than anyone has admitted.
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