Added on Thursday, May 28, 2009  Fish Post

IFA Surf City 2009

Hooking a stout pair of slot-sized red drum led to hooking a brand new boat for Swansboro Captains Rob Koraly and Gary Knight of the Sandbar Safari Fishing Team.

The two reds they brought to the scales at the IFA Redfish Tour Surf City Event weighed a combined 14.22 lbs., enough to top the competition by over one pound and earn the grand prize, a 2009 Ranger Banshee Extreme with a 60 hp Yamaha 4-stroke motor.

After landing a 25.25″ red from a school feeding in the marsh near Swansboro, Koraly knew he had part of the winning formula.

“That fish was just solid,” Koraly explained, “probably the fattest fish I’ve seen in the backwaters this year.”

The red, which fell for a smelt-colored Gulp Jerkshad, weighed over 7 lbs., usually a solid weight for even a 27″ fish. With a smaller red in the 4 lb. range in the livewell, Knight and Koraly had a good start, but both were confident they’d need another big one to break into the top five.

“I went to a little pocket where I was waiting on the tide to come up a bit,” Koraly said at the awards. “We got there and I caught two rats before the school moved.”

Following the school, the captains maneuvered their 22′ Nautic Star bay boat around 20 yards before Koraly spotted something interesting.

“I saw a big fish moving at the back of this pocket. I casted at it, but I couldn’t quite get there, even with the wind at our backs,” he said. “I finally pulled out a topwater plug and fired it over. The fish rose right off the grass on it and missed, so I casted again. He came about 10′ off the grass following it, rose on it, and flipped it into the air. I threw it in there one more time, twitched it twice, and he had to have it.”

After the big fish inhaled Koraly’s topwater plug, the fight was on, but it ended swiftly at Knight’s waiting net. The 26″ fish was also over 7 lbs., and the anglers knew they’d be a contender for the grand prize.

Since he hadn’t seen many upper-slot reds over the course of the spring, Koraly hoped that the other competitors weren’t finding any either.

“Those are actually the two biggest reds I’ve caught this year,” he explained, “and that’s actually the first one we’ve weighed in a tournament that we got on a topwater.”

At the weigh in, heavy traffic delayed many of the anglers on their way to the scales, giving Koraly plenty of time to worry about a larger pair of reds in a another competitor’s weigh bag. They never came, however, and the boat, along with $2500 in cash and other winnings, went to the Sandbar Safari crew.

Fellow Swansboro locals Lane Hurst and Jamie Riggs fished a similar stretch of marsh near Swansboro and came up with two red drum totaling 13.58 lbs. to finish second.

Like Koraly, they’d caught a number of smaller drum before they spotted their tournament winners.

“I saw a few bigger fish than we’d been catching,” Hurst explained, “and I knew if we hooked one it would spook the rest. So we both casted at the same time, and we both hooked up.”

Spinnerbaits produced the simultaneous hookup, and the pair of reds ended up being the fish that earned Hurst and Riggs second place.

A half-pound behind them, the Speckled Specialist crew of Capt. Ricky Kellum and Derrick Barbee hauled a pair of reds weighing 13.08 lbs. to the scales to finish third.

Kellum and Barbee fished the bays near the mouth of the New River, returning to an area where they’d located some fish while casting hookless topwater plugs earlier in the week.

Like the winners, they hooked one of their fish on a topwater plug and one on a Gulp bait.

“They bit topwater for about 25 minutes this morning,” Kellum explained. “Then it shut down and we had to go to the Gulp baits rigged weedless.”

Fourth place went to team Crystal Coast Graphics with Capts. Jeff Cronk and Mike Taylor with 12.92 lbs. of total weight. Capts. Rennie Clark and Andrew Arndt rounded out the top five, scaling two reds for a total of 12 lbs. even.