Friendly City Trout Tournament 2008
Larry Hill with a pair of speckled trout weighing 7 and 5.5 lbs. that went on to win the Friendly City Speckled Trout Tournament. Hill and his nephew Capt. Ricky Kellum caught the fish in the New River on float-rigged live shrimp.
With nearly a 33% lead on the second place weight, Capt. Ricky Kellum, of Speckled Specialist Charters in Jacksonville, and his uncle Larry Hill, of Indiana, scaled a trio of speckled trout weighing 16.60 lbs. to crush the competition in the 2008 Friendly City Speckled Trout Tournament, held November 8 out of Casper’s Marina in Swansboro.
When you operate a business named Speckled Specialist Charters, virtually every day could count as pre-fishing for a trout tournament, and Kellum had a good idea where to find some big fish going into the week of the event (after landing 10 in the 6 lb. class over the previous weeks), but he had difficulty in the final days before the tournament.
“We had bad fishing for two days right before,” Kellum explained.
At the outset of the tournament, it seemed the bad fishing would continue, as Kellum and Hill had an unproductive morning.
“We didn’t have but one fish by 2:00 that afternoon,” said the winning captain. “It had been a late bite before, so I wasn’t too worried. I told my uncle if we didn’t do anything by 2:00, we’d hunker down and put out 6 or 8 shrimp rods. It’s never a guarantee, though.”
Success may not have been guaranteed, but it came after the anglers hunkered down in a deep 30+’ hole in the New River near downtown Jacksonville.
With Kellum fishing 5 float rods baited with live shrimp, and Hill manning two, the bite got going as fishing time ran short in the event.
“We caught all our fish in 30 minutes,” Kellum said. All their fish included the 6.9 lb. speck that topped the tournament’s big fish TWT and a 5.5. lb. fish that would have won the tournament as a pair. Combined with their third biggest trout, at 4.2 lbs., the field didn’t stand a chance.
Every one of the Kellum/Hill team’s fish fell for live shrimp, although Kellum spent much of the day casting artificials as well.
“It’s that time where they should be biting artificials, especially where I was, but they only wanted shrimp,” Kellum revealed.
For topping the tournament’s aggregate category and the TWT, Kellum and Hill took home $2,484.
Jacksonville anglers Ryan Gilbert, Larry Green, and Todd Blum hauled three trout to the scales weighing 11.32 lbs. to capture second place, including a 4.52 lb. speck that took third in the TWT, for total winnings of $1,167.75.
Fishing aboard a 22′ Shearwater, the second place team also took their search for prize-winning trout to the New River after finding some quality fish early in the week. However, like the winners, they experienced some slow days right before the tournament, and spent most of the morning looking for fish.
‘They really didn’t start biting until 11:00 when the clouds came over,” Gilbert explained.
Anchoring up in an 8′ deep hole in a creek off the main river near Jacksonville, the anglers finally enjoyed some action, catching around 15 fish on live shrimp and MirrOlures until the bite slowed down around 2:30.
Ernest Humphrey and Billy Hill, of Jacksonville, bucked the trend of live baiting, using MirrOlures and Calcutta jerkbaits to land the three trout weighing 10.58 lbs. that earned them third place.
Humphrey and Hill fished a hole in the White Oak River aboard Humphrey’s Winner bass boat, and they caught their fish on the downcurrent sides of deeper holes, as opposed to the usually better up current sides.
Johnny Gainey and R.D. Benedict, of Swansboro, hauled 10.56 lbs. of trout to the scales, finishing fourth by a narrow margin. Doug and Jimmy Kellum locked up fifth place with a 9.22 lb. aggregate weight.
Jacksonville’s Stephanie Emperley weighed in a 2.60 lb. trout to take home the Friendly City event’s Top Lady Angler title, and a stout 4.2 lb. fish earned Zack Mabee, also of Jacksonville, the top spot in the Junior Angler competition.
