Added on Thursday, August 18, 2011  Fish Post

Onslow Bay Open KMT

Teaming up for the event, Capts. Roy Jarman and Jodie Gay, of team “Pro Build/Blue Water Candy,” scaled a 46.53 lb. king mackerel to earn victory by an even 2.5 lbs. at the 11^th Annual Onslow Bay Open, held August 12-13 out of Casper’s Marina in Swansboro.

Jarman, his girlfriend Lindsay Sanders, Gay, and his daughter Jesse Gay made up the crew of the 31’ Yamaha-powered Cape Horn for the tournament, and they also topped the event’s amberjack category with a 28.75 lb. fish and finished third in the dolphin competition.

The quartet chose to head north on the morning of the event, beginning their search for a winning mackerel off the Outer Banks.

“We’d been way up north,” Jodie Gay explained, “fishing towards Ocracoke. We caught the dolphin out there. We eventually worked our way back down to the Atlas Tanker.”

The tanker produced the crew’s big amberjack, but with time running low on the afternoon of the event, they still hadn’t had a king mackerel strike.

Trolling towards the D Wreck in a last ditch effort, the anglers almost abandoned ship, but Jesse Gay kept them in the game.
“We’d worked the captain’s meeting,” Jodie Gay reported. “I’d come home and gone to bed at 11:00 and set the alarm for 12:30 to get ready and get up there. The other three of us were ready to call it a day and come home, but Jesse said ‘let’s fish the last 30 minutes’ and we did.”

As the hour to head for the scales drew near, the anglers finally had not one, but two king mackerel bites.

“We had one bite,” Gay continued, “and another one just after it. We had to pick one since we were so low on time, so we chased the one that was going away from us the quickest. I’m truly convinced that other fish could have been a twin to the one we got.”

A live bluefish under a custom blue/chartreuse skirt of Jesse Gay’s design fooled the fish they went after.

With Jesse on the rod, the crew began following their fish offshore. Once they’d gotten on top of the fish, the crew found the battle had just begun.

“Once we had it close, that fish had some tricks to show us,” Gay said. “It stayed down a while, then I finally saw color and was looking for stripes because several big wahoo had been caught in there recently.”

The fish still had some energy left, however, and kept the crew on their toes.

“I finally got a good look and said ‘My goodness what a king mackerel’,” Gay continued. “Then it made a quick dash towards the motors, and I jumped in the splashwell to keep the line out of them.”

The next time the anglers got a look at their fish, Jarman was ready and planted a gaff and swung the smoker king over the Cape Horn’s gunnel.

“Everybody was laughing and cheering then,” reported Gay, “but I said we had to go and get to the scales. It was rough and getting rougher, but the Yamahas and the Cape Horn did us well.”

Deciding that with the worsening weather it would be a better call to run in Beaufort Inlet and take the ICW to the scales, the “Pro Build/Blue Water Candy” anglers made it to the scales with eight minutes to spare and secured their top finish. The winning team would like to thank Pro Build, Blue Water Candy, and Seaview Pier for their roles in the crew’s success.

Wrightsville Beach’s D. Logan and the “Logan’s Run” team earned second place in the tournament with a 44.03 lb. king mackerel, and Thomas Justice, on the “Justified,” rounded out the top three with a 42.48 lb. fish.

The Onslow Bay Open generates proceeds to support a variety of local children’s charities, including the Boys and Girls Home of NC, Boys and Girls Club of Coastal Carolina, Carteret County Shop with a Cop, Children’s Flight of Hope, NC Special Olympics, and Onslow Christmas Cheer. This year’s event will bring the total proceeds generated by the tournament to approximately $212,000.

More information is available at www.obokmt.us.