Cape Fear Home Builders Fish Tales Tournament
George Bridger and teammates with the 26.5 lb. king mackerel that earned them first place in that category of the Wilmington-Cape Fear Homebuilders Fish Tales Tournament, held August 18 out of Dockside Marina.
Placing twice on the event’s separate-species leaderboards, Capt. Wayne Crisco, of Last Resort Charters, took home the honors for first place flounder (4.7 lbs.) and third place red drum (6.1 lbs.) in the 4th Annual Wilmington-Cape Fear Homebuilders Association Fish Tales Tournament, held August 18 out of Dockside Marina.
Crisco and partner Michael Clark, of Surf City’s East Coast Sports, went into their day with a game plan and stuck to it.
“I told Clark we were going to fish for flounder till 11:00 and then go look for a drum,” Crisco explained. “That’s exactly what we did.”
Secretive about their flounder hole, Crisco only referred to it as an ICW dock, and the anglers found consistent action with flounder for much of the morning on Carolina-rigged finger mullet.
“Clark caught that big fish around 10:30,” Crisco reported, “and I said, ‘we got a good one, let’s go look for a drum.’”
With the falling tide that Crisco wanted to see, the anglers headed to the spot that he had scouted out for some upper-slot red drum, the mouth of a feeder creek near a local inlet.
“I was anticipating a bunch of boats in our drum hole,” he continued, “but we were the only ones there.”
Their drum spot failed to disappoint, and Clark and Crisco began catching reds almost immediately, again using live finger mullet. Though they were catching fish consistently, at first all were over 27” long. The anglers finally caught several between 26-27”, putting their third place fish in the boat before heading for Dockside and the scales.
Topping the event’s speckled trout category, Wilmington’s Luke Tippett scaled a 1.7 lb. fish to take home the first place check.
Fishing with his father Mark, the anglers specifically targeted trout in their quest to take home a check.
“Catching a trout was our first priority,” Tippett explained. “I knew only two had been weighed in last year, so I figured an 18 inch fish could give us first place.”
Prospecting around some grass islands in the lower Cape Fear River, the Tippetts found some hungry specks early on the morning of the event.
“We were catching a bunch of fish, but they were all small,” Tippett explained.
After releasing yet another short trout that had fallen for a MirrOlure MR17, the angler had an idea.
“I figured if we moved to a little deeper water and fished a little deeper, we might catch a bigger fish,” Tippett said.
Tying on a chartreuse grub, the anglers repositioned slightly, and Tippett was soon hooked up to the 1.7 lb. winning speck.
Butch Davis secured first place in the tournament’s drum category with a 6.8 lb. red drum. Kevin Gray, fishing with Capt. Jeff Wolfe of Seahawk Inshore Fishing Charters, earned second place with a 6.2 lb. red and also secured second in the speckled trout category with a 1.1 lb. fish.
Andy Tolhurst’s 4.0 lb. flounder took second place in the flatfish competition, and Sam Daughtry secured third with a 3.3 lb. fish.
George Bridger pocketed the winner’s check in the tournament’s only offshore category with a 26.5 lb. king mackerel. Will Callahan was hot on his heels with a 25.9 lb. fish that was the only other king weighed.
More information on the event and the Wilmington-Cape Fear Home Builders Association itself are available at www.wilmingtonhomebuilders.com.
