When I first started turkey hunting about 20 years ago, it took me a while to get rid of the big goose egg and wrap my tag around a gobbler’s leg. Quite a few seasons, as I recall.
Once I broke through and killed a bird, things appeared to get easier. I’ve tagged one or two every season since then. I no longer grade my season by how many chances I screwed up, but by the number of Gobbler McNuggets floating in the hot grease.
I hope the same thing works out for me with bull redfish. I’ve carried the jinx monkey around on my back for quite a while. I caught my first red about the same time I first went turkey hunting — it was one of those standard 18-inch fish that falls perfectly in the middle of the slot limit.
And I’ve caught quite a few since then, up to 30 inches or so, on live bait, cut bait, soft-plastics, hard baits — you name it.
But I had never caught a bull red. I should have been out after three strikes, but I stayed in the batter’s box. In the last five years, I have been attached to three bull reds — I consider fish 35 inches or longer bulls.
One sucked down a soft-plastic grub I was bouncing along the bottom of the Pamlico Sound behind North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The bite felt like a flounder, so I didn’t set the hook right away, and my reward was watching a big red suddenly burst the surface and spit my jig back at me — the point of the hook penetrated my jeans and left a mark. The second time, I thought I had him a bull red tired out in the middle of Beresford Creek near Charleston, when he decided to head to the bank. He wrapped me around the keel of a sailboat. A year or so ago, fishing in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, I had a big red almost spool me, but when I started to regain the line, he made a determined run and broke me off around an oil-platform piling.
What did all three close encounters have in common? I was using trout-class tackle, fishing for specks.
About a month before you read this, I finally broke through. Fishing some shoals outside a major South Carolina inlet, I hooked a big red on a piece of cut mullet, and actually got it to the boat. The fish was 42 inches long and weighed 24 pounds. Before the day was over, I had caught two more reds that measured better than 35 inches. My fishing party wound up with eight bulls, three of which measured between 46 and 50 inches and pushed the 40-pound mark. Yes, we were using tackle more suited to the big bruisers.
Hopefully, now that I’m no longer skunked, the big reds will get easier — just like the gobblers did.
After putting a check mark in the box beside “bull reds,” I took inventory of my hunting and fishing goals. Hoping my three big reds will create a groundswell of success, I have decided it’s only a matter of time before I kill a 10-point buck. Those three 8-pointers need to be replaced at the top of the list. While I’m at it, how ’bout a nice 8-pound largemouth bass? My biggest bass, a 7-pound, 13-ounce chunk, was caught about 15 years ago. And as long as I’m day-dreaming, a 2½-pound crappie would do very nicely, thank you. And I’d love a 5-pound speckled trout and a 5-pound flounder. How ’bout a 250-pound wild hog for sausage?
Sounds like a wish list, huh? Well, Christmas is on the way.
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