Added on Thursday, April 23, 2009  Fish Post

Cold Water Red Daze 2009

March can be a tough month to be an angler in our area. The wintertime cabin fever and fishing cravings have reached their apex at the same cruel time most of the offshore action is taking place 50 or more miles off the beach and the icy inshore water temperatures have the fish that are around lethargic, difficult to find, and far less hungry than in the warmer months.

However, according to Wilmington Capt. Mike Hoffman, anglers in the know shouldn’t let cold water stand between themselves and hot pre-spring inshore fishing.

“I’ve caught fish every week this year except for the two we had snow,” Mike, who runs Corona Daze Charters, said as Gary Hurley and I hopped aboard his 22′ Sea Hunt one morning early in the month when March was living up to its “in like a lion” reputation.

Although the noontime high climbed into the mid-60’s, an unrelenting breeze from the northeast had sprung up the day before and freshened overnight, keeping the three of us clad in winter gear as Mike pushed up the throttle coming out of the no wake zone north of the Wrightsville Beach drawbridge.

Thankfully, our run into the cold wind only lasted a few short minutes, as Mike eased the Sea Hunt off plane and idled towards a residential dock behind north Wrightsville Beach. Much of Mike’s fishing during the cooler months centers around a number of docks he’s identified that hold schools of red and black drum consistently in the cold water.

“I’ve been fishing a big school of big reds here all winter,” he said. “I’ve been blistering them and the black drum at a few other docks, but it seems like most of those fish are smaller 16-20″ puppies. These fish have been in the slot with a few up around 30″. They’re some ding-dong drum.”

“We’ll just ease up to that sea wall right there and tie off,” Mike explained, pulling out a long dock line. “This wind will have us sitting perfect towards the dock. About the only good thing about a northeast wind, though. I hate fishing them.”

This exclamation about the wind aside, Mike was still confident as he handed Gary and I a pair of medium-light spinning rods rigged with light jigheads. Grabbing a rod for himself, he demonstrated how to thread a whole shrimp onto the jig’s collar just as one would a soft plastic bait.

“Cast yours right over there, Max,” Mike urged, using his rod tip to point out the junction of two sets of pilings beneath the dock. “Gary, you throw just to the left. Let it go to the bottom and just keep the line tight. Don’t move it at all.”

“You’re not putting any action on it at all, huh?” Gary queried. “Sweet, that’s not hard.”

“Most times, they won’t touch it if you move it,” Mike replied as his cast plopped down next to a piling farther out the dock.

After we left our motionless baits out for a few minutes, Mike had us reel in and cast to slightly different areas of the dock.

“That school mills around here,” he explained after we’d repositioned the shrimp. “What they’ll do is run across this dock right there where it’s 4-5′ and then scoot out towards the deeper hole off the end of the dock. We’ll actually be able to see them about 10:00 when the sun gets high enough.”

Sure enough, although it didn’t take till 10:00, Mike started pointing off the boat’s transom a few minutes later.

“Here they come! Gary, look!”

Gary leaned out over the rail, and I stepped to their side of the boat just in time to see my first red drum of the year cruising sedately beneath the boat’s bow and towards the dock and our baits. A grin already spreading across my face, I waited for the pickup of a fish inhaling my shrimp from its resting place beside a barnacled piling, and hoped that I’d manage to pull the fish away before it took an unhealthy (for me at least) interest in the structure.

However, despite the fact that the school swam directly towards our baits, all three of us were snubbed by the reds for a few painful minutes.

Finally, we heard Mike utter something along the lines of “there he is.” He dropped his rod tip and set the hook.

“Max, there’s a net inside the console, can you grab that thing?” Mike asked, keeping his rod tip high to combat the fish’s efforts to head towards the pilings.

More than happy to oblige the hooked-up captain, I grabbed the landing net with one hand while keeping my rod in the other, hoping for a double-hookup.

After a quick battle with a tense moment when we saw a spotted tail boil the water’s surface a few short feet from the dock, Mike slid the fish into the net and swung it aboard, a pretty red drum around 20″. It had been months since I’d even seen a red, and now that we’d put one in the boat, the cabin fever was long gone.

As Mike unhooked and released the red, I was silently reprimanding myself for all the action I’d missed since curtailing my inshore angling when the trout bite slowed down in December.

“This water is 55 degrees today,” Mike explained after we reset our baits, “and I’ve been catching these fish right here since it was 46. They’re here all year, and you can see them, too. A lot of people don’t have the patience for them this time of year, but I’ll sit here and leave the shrimp on the bottom for two hours as long as I can see them. They’ve got to eat just like everybody else. They just pick their moments.”

After another short lull, Gary’s number was the next called, and I turned towards him just in time to see his rod bow up under the strain of another dock-bound red. His fish was nearly a mirror image of Mike’s icebreaker, and he was soon leading it into Mike’s waiting net.

Gary’s redfish swam back to rejoin its schoolmates after posing for a quick photo, and we threaded fresh shrimp onto our jigs. Mike explained a bit about his choice in baits for the early-season drum.

“I catch a whole lot of fish on Gulp shrimp, and I fish them a lot, but let me tell you, in this colder water, when these fish are on the docks, I’ve thrown them and thrown them with no bites, then thrown a shrimp and it’s on. You just can’t beat a real shrimp, and they’re even better if you can get them with the heads on.”

By this point, the sun was high enough that we could plainly see the large school of fish milling unpredictably around the dock and nearby deep hole. It turned into a game of trying to predict which way the fish would turn next, and then put the baits in front of them.

However, despite watching dozens of fish swim by, around, and directly over our baits, our offerings were roundly ignored for the next half-hour. Mike may be a patient angler, but Gary had an early afternoon obligation to attend to, and the captain wanted to put us on some faster action before we had to head in.

“The tide’s still falling out just a little bit here,” Mike explained, “and I’ve got a dock up on Figure Eight that’s real good on the first part of a rising tide. Let’s run up there and check it out.”

Since it had warmed up considerably over the morning, the ride north to Figure Eight was still blustery, but much less chilling than our short cruise earlier, and we were soon pulling up to Mike’s next choice dock.

“We can just stick the nose of the boat on the sand and sit right in here perfect,” he explained, gently bumping the Sea Hunt’s bow into the shallow bottom a few feet from the shoreline.

We again baited the jigs with whole shrimp and pitched them towards the dock. Our angle to the sun prevented us from seeing whether there was a school beneath this dock as well, but Mike assured us there was.

If we needed any further proof, Mike was quick to provide it when he set the hook on his first cast and finagled another pup from between a pair of pilings.

“These fish are mostly a little smaller,” he said, cradling the 18″ drum, “but they’re in here thick, believe me.”

Almost immediately afterward, I felt something nudge my bait, then slowly move off. As the line came tight, I brought the rod tip up sharply and was delighted to see my first red of the year boil in the shadows beneath the far side of the dock.

Determined not to lose the fish, I worked it quickly from beneath the dock, then relaxed a little and let the red pull some drag before bringing it to Mike’s net. A quick hello/photo/goodbye sequence sent the fish on its way.

The bite had been very subtle for a red drum, fish not usually known for eating daintily, and Mike explained that it was generally that way in the colder water.

“You have to finesse them a lot when they’re cold to even get them to bite. That’s why I use such little jigs. These are 1/8 oz., like crappie jigs. I was using 1/4 oz. heads, and a lot of days they wouldn’t eat that, and you can forget about a Carolina rig, buddy.”

By the time I was baited and casting again, I noticed Gary was hooked up to yet another red. The bite stayed hot, with one of us hooked up essentially until we had to get Gary back to the dock. I’d been planning to ride home with the boss, but as we were leaving to drop Gary off, Mike made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“I hate that we didn’t catch those bigger fish earlier,” he said. “They might be chewing now. Let’s go back and see after we drop Gary off and I’ll give you a ride.”

Obviously there was only one answer to that proposition, and after we bid farewell to Gary, we returned to our first spot, tying off one dock down from where we had in the morning.

The fish were less visible at this spot, but again Mike’s confidence was high, and I had no reason to doubt him after the first docks we’d hit. Again he pinpointed the exact locations to cast to, giving a specific and small target for each cast.

It only took three casts before we found the fish. Mike was the first to hook up, but I followed him in short order. These fish were definitely a better class than the ones we’d hooked in the morning, and keeping them from getting to the dock’s pilings proved a much harder task, one that made me glad we were fishing with braid instead of mono.

With my drag tightened to a point I rarely fish inshore, I finally turned my fish and Mike slid a net beneath it moments after letting his own fish go. The action continued much as it had at the last spot (with larger fish to boot), and Mike and I released at least a dozen fish over the next half-hour.

Most of the fish were solid reds in the mid-20″ range, the same models me and plenty of other anglers catch in the marshes and surf in the summer and fall. However, the March reds we caught over the course of this day go down as some of the earliest reds I’ve caught in a calendar year. Unfortunately for the drum, I won’t be overlooking them in the coming winters.

Of course, neither will Capt. Mike Hoffman, who represents a far greater threat to the reds’ peaceful dock existence. In addition to reds, he targets black drum and trout over the cold months. When it’s warmer, he chases reds, trout, and flounder along with king mackerel, dolphin, and other offshore species. To book a charter with Mike or get more information about Corona Daze, give him a call at (910) 619-8509 or visit his website at www.coronadazecharters.com.