Tidelines – September 11, 2014
Capt. Jamie Rushing, of Seagate Charters, with an overslot red drum that hit an Excaliber Spook topwater on an early morning incoming tide. He was fishing near Wrightsville Beach.
Convenience and efficiency are much more attractive to me these days, as I am still having transitional issues with the end of summer and the busy schedule that comes with the overlap of Fisherman’s Post and my teaching responsibilities at Cape Fear Community College. So Capt. Jamie Rushing, of Seagate Charters in the Wrightsville Beach area, was a logical choice to sneak in a morning trip before heading into the office for an afternoon of tackling items on the ever growing “to do” list.
The convenience part was easy—I met Jamie at the Trails End boat ramp just a few miles from the Fisherman’s Post office. It was more the efficiency on this trip that was really appreciated.
Jamie is a very practical, results-driven charter boat captain. From previous trips with him I know that he doesn’t find it necessary to stock the boat with expensive Spro bucktails when there are plenty of cheaper bucktails that produce fish just as well. Same with soft plastics. He might have a few choices on board, but I also guarantee that he doesn’t hesitate to cast out the standard issue green grub.
His decision making process is really quite simple. Will a product or a technique either (1) help my clients catch more fish, or (2) help my clients have a better time in general on the charter (and 9 times out of 10 it’s really the same question).
For example, Jamie’s philosophy on topwaters (which we threw at both trout and red drum on our morning together) is that fish care little about color so go with bright colors. The bright color allows the angler to better see the bait’s action as he/she works it back to the boat.
Another example would be his ongoing pursuit to find fish in local waters. On occasion he likes running the river or heading to Buzzards Bay (or even the shoals), but he’d rather not spend 25 or so minutes of his clients’ time running from point A to point B. He’d rather spend that time fishing, so almost every day he is searching for fish not far from Trails End or the Wrightsville Beach public boat ramp (the locations where he most often picks up clients).
And yet another example would be him targeting the Liberty Ship as one of the first stops when taking clients out in the ocean for a little flounder fishing. Some clients, as every charter captain will tell you, have trouble with sea sickness. For that reason, Jamie stops at the Liberty Ship, not just because he knows there are strong numbers of legal flounder there, but also because if the clients don’t feel well on the ocean then he is only a quick run away from heading back inshore to look for fish along the ICW or in area creeks.
Jamie needed his results-driven approach for our trip together, as I told him the night before that I wanted an inshore slam and had to be back at the Fisherman’s Post office shortly after 12:00 noon. When I pulled into the parking area just shy of 6:30 am, Jamie had the boat in the water, engine idling, and topwaters tied on for our first stop—a deep water ledge near some oyster bars and rocks where resident summer trout hang out.
A few quick passes produced some mild blowups on the topwaters but no fish interested enough to pull the hook tight, so he re-geared us with Rapala subsurface baits with a side-to-side rattling action, as opposed to the traditional forward-to-back rattling action. And as Jamie predicted, the fancy hard bait produced a couple of quick trout on the next two passes, all in the 16-20” range.
With legal-sized trout recorded, we headed to the next stop, a grass bank with sporadic oyster outcrops. The topwaters for me once again only produced a few half-hearted boils, but Jamie found what we were looking for quickly into a cast that landed just a few feet off the bank. We put the Power-Pole down and let the oversized red drum take several runs from boat to grass bank before finally coming to the net where Jamie posed for a few publicity photos.
The next stop was the Liberty Ship, or at least a few numbers Jamie targets in the area of the Liberty Ship. We each caught a few quick flounder (which completed Jamie’s inshore slam), but only one of them was 15+”, so we decided to head back to the red drum hole and put a finger mullet or two on the bottom to complete mine.
I think our baits were in the water 10 minutes before the rod bent over and I was bringing in a mid-slot red drum for my own publicity shoot.
Our trip together was the basic Seagate Charters trip. He starts by trying for a trout or two, then heads for red drum, and often finishes with flounder (sometimes the tide will have him modify the order). I suggest giving Capt. Jamie Rusing a call for your own inshore/nearshore adventure. Or by the end of November you can catch him just about any day on the Cape Fear River targeting stripers.
Perhaps that’s my next trip with Jamie—the convenience of meeting at the downtown Wilmington boat ramp, and the efficiency of landing multiple stripers before lunch? I wonder if he will let me cast that fancy (expensive) hard plastic bait in the snaggy Cape Fear River.
