Capt. Kyle’s Thanksgiving Inshore Classic 2008
Despite a rainy, cool, and windy forecast for the Saturday following Thanksgiving, the 10 boats in Capt. Kyle’s Thanksgiving Inshore Classic, held November 29 out of the Ocean Isle Fishing Center, hauled some serious speckled trout to the scales.
“We were all cold and wet,” Capt. Kyle Hughes, who runs Speckulator Charters out of the OIFC and coordinates the annual event, explained, “but the fishing was good and the trout actually bit very well. Our trout fishing is just getting really good down here.”
A trio of fat speckled trout weighing 14.90 lbs. earned first place in the event for Supply anglers Mike Fields and Adam Sellers, fishing aboard a 24′ Nauticstar bay boat.
Their largest trout, at 5.2 lbs., also topped the event’s single big fish TWT.
“We got pretty fortunate down there,” Fields said happily.
The anglers targeted creekmouths in the Lockwood Folly River in their search for big specks.
Fishing live shrimp on float rigs, they began catching them early. Fields and Sellers found several big trout, including one over 5 lbs., before the bite slowed down as the rain strengthened over the course of the morning.
“We caught the last two fish we weighed pretty late,” Fields said. “One of our fish was 5.2 lbs. and one was just over 5, and I’m not sure which one we caught in the morning and which one bit in the afternoon.”
In addition to the pair of big fish, they had several fish over the 4 lb. mark. After running to Ocean Isle to weigh in, the anglers returned to the area they’d been fishing and released the two largest trout.
“Lockwood Folly’s kind of our home turf,” Fields explained, “so we turned them loose back there. We were going to release the others, but they didn’t look as good. Those big ones swam right off, though.”
Brandon Sauls and Clay Morphis, from Ocean Isle, weighed in three trout for a total of 12.00 lbs. to secure second place. They fished the event aboard Sauls’ 18′ Bone Boat “Bone Crusher” and captured the second place big fish prize with a 4.60 lb. speck.
“We got up and got to the Little River jetties at 5:30 that morning to get our spot,” Sauls said, “and it started raining as soon as we got there.”
The rain didn’t seem to hurt the early bite, as the anglers landed all the fish they weighed during the first few hours of fishing.
“It all happened in the first 2-3 hours,” said Sauls. “The wind had been west, and it swung to northwest that morning and we kept catching fish. Around 10:30, it went east and the bite just died for us. Kyle was fishing the other jetty, and it was the opposite for him. He hadn’t been catching them early, but he started to when the wind turned.”
Like the winners, the “Bone Crusher” anglers caught all their fish on live shrimp underneath floats.
Capt. Kyle Hughes, fishing with his father Nathaniel, locked up third place in the event with a three-trout stringer weighing 11.00 lbs., including the 4.20 lb. third place big fish.
The Hughes’ crew also targeted the Little River jetties with live shrimp. They found a tough bite at first, but they started catching their fish when the wind went to the east and the tide began falling.
“It was slow at first,” Kyle Hughes explained. “Things took a little while to get started, but it got good when the tide turned in the mid-morning and we had a pretty steady pick of fish after that. It wasn’t every cast, but we’d hang a fish every few minutes.”
The weather may have put a damper on the tournament’s entries this year, but it certainly didn’t hurt the speckled trout bite. Hughes wished to thank all the anglers who fished.
