Hook & Bones / Carolina Redfish Series
Capts. Rennie Clark and Drew Arndt with the pair of red drum totaling 14.07 lbs. that earned them first place in the Carolina Redfish Series/Hook and Bones Redfish Open. The reds struck Rapala Skitterwalk topwaters on a New River flat.
Scaling a pair of red drum that totaled 14.07 lbs., Capts. Rennie Clark and Drew Arndt—Team Tournament Trail Charters—eased past their competition by nearly a pound to capture the $5,000 first place bounty in the 2014 Hook and Bones Redfish Open/Carolina Redfish Series Event #2, held out of the Swansboro Waterfont on August 9.
Redfish tournament veterans, the Wilmington captains teamed up for the event aboard Clark’s 22’ skiff, and the pair had a solid idea of where they wanted to be on the morning of the tournament.
“I went and looked at a couple spots near Swansboro the day before,” Clark explained, “but we ended up fishing a school of reds I’ve been on for over three months in the Topsail/New River area. We needed a high tide to get to those fish, and we had one that morning.”
After running south from Swansboro and making their way onto the flat where the reds had been feeding, it didn’t take the anglers long to find some topwater action.
“We both hooked up on our first cast,” Clark continued. “Drew pulled the hooks on his, but I landed mine and he hooked up again on his second. We had two 26-inch reds in the boat in our first three casts.”
Though the fish were approaching the 27” maximum slot size for reds in NC, Clark described them as skinny fish, and the anglers continued hunting for some weightier reds to haul back to the scales.
“There were two separate schools of fish on that flat,” Clark said. “Those 26-inch fish were long and thin, but there were some big-shouldered upper-slot fish feeding along with a school of over-slots.”
Sticking with the topwater program, the anglers continued to catch smaller and larger reds, upgrading the pair in their livewell each time they landed a heavier fish that fell under the 27” mark.
“We caught a couple of fish on Cat. 5 soft plastics we’d cast in after a blowup,” Clark reported, “but we soon found out they were going to eat topwaters until we quit throwing them.”
After releasing a heartbreaking fish barely over 27” and another measuring 30”, the anglers found some upgrade fish, and steadily culled out the fish in their livewell until they had one a hair over 7 lbs. and another just under, according to Arndt’s Boga Grip scale.
“That scale’s been dead on for us in IFA tournaments,” Clark said. “I was pretty confident if we had 14 lbs. we were going to be finishing first or second–you don’t see that many 14 lb. bags in NC tournaments. It seems like those Swansboro guys are always on some fat fish, though, and a high tide is awesome around Swansboro.”
When the weigh-in closed at 4:00 Saturday afternoon, Arndt’s scale was proven correct and the Tournament Trail Charters crew indeed had the only 14 lb. aggregate in the event.
Capt. Chris Sewell and Dick Kellum scaled a 13.17 lb. pair of reds to finish second in the event, and John Hislop and Rick Patterson of Team Trueline rounded out the top three with a 12.71 lb. aggregate.
More information on the tournament and a full leaderboard can be found at www.hookandbones.com.
