A Spade in the Hand
If a typical summertime Myrtle Beach tourist thinks of spades at all, they’re likely thinking in reference to a winning card hand aboard one of the area’s gambling boats. Lifelong area resident Capt. Mark Dickson, who operates Shallow Minded Guide Fishing out of North Myrtle Beach, thinks of another spade when the weather and water temperatures get hot—the Atlantic spadefish, a summer resident at the nearshore reefs and structure just offshore of the area’s busy beaches.
Even the would-be winners aboard the towering gaming vessel that followed us out the inlet would be hard-pressed to be as confident as Mark was after anchoring his boat, a 24’ Yamaha-powered Triton bay boat, at the General Sherman, a wreck located around 6 miles southwest of Little River Inlet.
“They’ll be here,” Mark reassured Gary Hurley and I as we peered into the water with anticipation. “Pull up the rope over there and keep looking down.”
I complied, shortening the line our chum—three cannonball jellyfish (jelly balls) strung on a rope—while Gary and Mark kept a watchful eye on the jellies dangling from the boat’s other side. While Gary and I didn’t doubt Mark’s confidence, we weren’t sure what to expect. Would a huge school of these exotic-looking fish just appear in the clear water, eager to take our baits as Mark had described?
“We just set out the jelly balls,” Mark explained to us, pulling a fillet knife and cutting board out of a compartment in the Triton’s stern. “And I chunk one of them up on the cutting board. When the fish show up, I’ll toss some of the jelly in, and they’ll get on the jelly balls. Typically, it takes less than 30 minutes.”
After Mark tied some #2 Gamakatsu circle hooks onto the 2’ of 20 lb. fluorocarbon leaders, he glanced at the water again and saw what he’d been looking for.
“There they are,” the captain announced, pointing into the water a few yards off the boat’s port side. Gary and I followed his indication, and saw a beautiful site—dozens of silver-flanked, broad-sided forms the size of hubcaps slowly materializing from the depths.
Mark scooped the handful of jelly ball bits from the cutting board, lobbing them into the water just in front of the school. As the fish sensed a free meal and quickened their pace to the boat, Mark pinned a strip of one of the cannonballs to the circle hooks on two of the 7’ Star spinning rods he’d rigged up and handed one to each of us.
The slow-sinking chunks must have excited the school, as a dozen fish out of the hundred or more visible swam to the surface and started nibbling on the tethered jelly balls, their dorsal fins and backs out of the water as they mobbed the chum.
Mark provided a quick and effective demonstration of the simple technique we’d be using to hook up, dropping the jelly strip into the mass of feeding fish and immediately getting a bite.
“With these little circle hooks, you just let them swim off with it, and they’re on,” Mark said as his fish nibbled, then swam straight down, putting a substantial bend in the light spinning rod.
For fish that approached with some caution and look a little ungainly, though beautiful, the spades put up a serious fight. Gary and I soon joined the action, dropping weightless strips of the jelly ball into the melee and hooking up quickly. Once hooked, the fish swim straight down, zipping line off the reel at a pace their compressed bodies hardly seem capable of.
As Gary and I pumped our fish back up, we’d get them around halfway to the surface, and then our adversaries seemed to get second winds (currents?), surging back towards the structure and turning their broad sides to the pressure we exerted. The spades not only run fast, they’ve got endurance, and each fish fought doggedly for at least five minutes against the light tackle before we were able to work them to the surface.
“When you get them up, just grab them like this,” Dickson explained, demonstrating how to leader a spadefish, then hold it by cradling its belly in one hand. With fish on deck, we posed for a quick photo, and then weighed the spades to confirm the already painfully obvious fact that Gary’s was larger. His fish went 7 lbs., while mine was a bit over 5 lbs. Both were larger by far than any spadefish I’d seen snorkeling or hooked incidentally in the past.
The spades are excellent eating, but with a surplus of fish occupying my refrigerator and freezer at the time, I elected to let mine rejoin the school. Gary’s fish wasn’t as lucky, and Mark slid a blue cooler to the bow of the boat for the big spade, adding a bag of ice after Gary dropped in the fish. The spades’ broad sides make for a large, though somewhat difficult to access fillet, and with Gary’s fat first spade in the cooler, we released the rest we hooked over the day.
While we’d been fighting our fish, the school had disappeared; however, Mark was confident (and entitled to it) and knew they’d return. “They just kind of mill around the wreck,” he explained while resetting the jelly ball chum lines and cutting up another jelly. “They’ll be back.”
Sure enough, after about five minutes, the school re-appeared again, apparently bent on a mission to nibble our jelly balls to nothing just 3’ from the gunnel. Again, Gary and I hooked up, battling two more fat spades in a tense up and down struggle before we were finally able to lift them from the water (I’m sad to report that yet again, Gary’s was a bit larger).
With the jelly balls maintaining the fish’s interest, we were able to repeat this process several times, with Gary, Mark, or I and often two of us hooked up continually.
The jelly balls are key to successfully targeting big spadefish on the artificial reefs, and after we met Mark at his slip in Anchor Marina that morning and headed out Little River Inlet, Mark hung a right just after the jetties. The falling tide formed a well-defined tideline between the dark inshore water and the greener ocean, and a number of the jelly balls were drifting along close to the current edge.
Handing me a landing net, the captain bumped the boat into forward and reverse, while I scrambled from stern to bow, dipping up the cannonballs that Mark approached. It took less than 10 minutes to gather over a dozen, plenty for our planned short outing.
“We’ve got more jelly balls this year than I’ve ever seen before,” Mark commented while I emptied three balls from the net into his livewell. “Some years, like last year, we don’t have any at all.”
Mark has discovered that the jelly balls seem to remain effective when frozen in water, so anglers can stockpile some when they’re plentiful in order to have baits and chum for the lean times.
“Most guys stick a coat hanger through them, but I’ve found you can just use a rope,” the captain explained, using his thumb to force a 3/8” rope through three of the jelly balls. “I think the rope might attract them, too.”
He also rigged one jelly ball line up with a hanger, opening the wire and making a loop before impaling three more jellies and twisting it closed. Mark attaches the coat hanger to a live bait or spanish trolling rod with a snap swivel, and then places it on the kingfish rod holder of his T-top. This serves to dangle the hanger on the surface a few feet out from the gunnel, allowing anglers to fight fish with less obstruction than if the rod was in a gunnel holder.
With the rope cleated off one side of the big Triton bay boat and the coat hanger line dangling from the T-top, the spadefish have plenty to snack on when they approach the boat.
The fish were still milling around the boat and pecking at the jelly balls when we released what I believe were our fourth and fifth spades, and I was about to drop another jelly strip into the fray when I saw a movement that stalled me. Mark had told us to be on the lookout for cobia as he’d seen and caught several around the nearshore reefs recently, and as I called for Mark to get the rod rigged with a cobia-tempting bucktail, the shape grew larger.
“Whoa, that’s a shark, big shark,” I exclaimed.
“Probably a big sand tiger,” Mark said as the shark faded from sight. “They like to hang around the wrecks this time of year. He probably just lunched a couple spadefish.”
When I glanced back at the water, ready to drop a bait into an immediate hookup, the fish had vanished, in all likelihood because of the shark.
“They get nervous when the sharks are around,” Mark explained. “They act like that when there are divers in the water, too.”
While we waited for the spadefish to return, a smaller mysterious shape appeared near the boat, and this time, it looked like a cobia. Mark grabbed a bucktail rod and began casting, but unfortunately, the fish disappeared as suddenly as it had shown up. A few blind casts later, he put the rod back in the holder.
Soon after the cobia swam off, the spades were back, and Gary, Mark, and I all hooked in short order. My fish felt like it might have a little more size than my first few (mostly between 5-6 lbs.), and I was getting excited; however, before the near vertical run ended, I felt an odd resistance and the line popped.
Yes, the wily spade had pulled a grouper impersonation, taking me into the wreck and cutting me off. For some reason, that scenario hadn’t occurred to me, and after tying on a new hook, I tried to put more pressure of the fish when they went deep. It worked pretty well, as I landed several more, although lost one more to a cutoff. I wasn’t alone either, as I saw the same scene played out with a big spade Gary was fighting as well.
We caught a few more spades, most falling between 5-7 lbs. before Mark fought one for a little bit longer, finally scooping up what was clearly the day’s largest fish. His scale pegged it at 8 lbs. even, the largest spadefish by far that I’d ever seen.
With at least a dozen spadefish releases in less than two hours fishing, Gary and I were able to understand Dickson’s confidence in this fast-action fishery. With our spadefish mission complete, we decided to head for the Little River jetties with plenty of day left.
“These fish are here all summer. I just get a kick of how all the people on the beach over there just have no idea this is going on out here,” he said gesturing to the North Myrtle Beach skyline, a strip of resorts and hotels that appeared to be floating just above the horizon in the light summer haze.
Spadefish also congregate on other nearshore structure, such as the Jim Caudle Reef a bit closer to the beach, but Dickson has had the best luck with the larger fish out at the General Sherman. He’s been targeting spades since 1990 when he and Jim Caudle learned about the technique from some Charleston anglers, and he has seen the popularity of this type of fishing explode since then. While we didn’t see another boat targeting spades on the Friday of our trip, Mark assured us that the reef would be covered up in spadefish anglers by the next day, a fair-forecast Saturday.
The only downside to this consistent summer fishery may be that it’s fairly weather dependent. High winds make it impossible to get out to the reefs where the spadefish live. Fortunately, Mark has been targeting inshore species like speckled trout, red drum, and flounder virtually his whole life, so there are still some strong fishing options when it’s too rough to chase the spades.
In addition to his obvious talent for putting people on fish, Mark is quite an entertaining person to share a boat with. And as a lifelong resident of Myrtle Beach, he is full of stories and knowledge about the area both new and old. Call him at (843) 458-3055 or visit his website www.fishmyrtlebeach.com to book a trip with him or get more information.
