Added on Thursday, June 28, 2012  Fish Post

The Grouper Window

It’s amazing how fast things can turn around on a fishing boat, and I think Gary Hurley would have been the first to agree, as the gag grouper Capt. Chris Kimrey was sinking a gaff into turned him from whipping boy to winner in an instant.

Gary hadn’t had the most auspicious start to our trip, as he already had a forgotten raincoat forcing a detour back to the dock and a broken rod to his credit, but grouper heal all wounds as they say (I think they say that). Of course, he’d been the subject of more than a little needling for these minor gaffes, but the Publisher further reversed his standing on the vessel by giving another healthy grouper a fiberglass coffin a few minutes later.

My third drop to the structure resulted in the same end as the first two, a not insignificant battle with a 20-30 lb. amberjack, and I realized that I’d quickly become the weak link onboard and had better make a deposit in my own grouper account, if only to avoid the inevitable title of “King Jack.”

Only 12 hours earlier, I’d been sitting in a Morehead City hotel room dividing my concentration between a dinner and a local newscast when a statement in the weather forecast brought my concentration into full focus.

“Now we’re not calling this a tropical storm…yet,” were the weatherman’s words as he gestured to a mass of clouds beginning to develop a familiar circular rotation off the South Carolina/Georgia coast.

Chris, who operates the aptly-named Mount Maker Charters in addition to his more artistic business, Custom Saltwater Taxidermy, was unconcerned as we met him at his slip behind Capt. Joe Shute’s Bait and Tackle on the Atlantic Beach causeway the next morning.

“We’ve got a window,” he said in between trading some early barbs with Shute and fellow dockmate Capt. George Beckwith, both preparing for cobia trips that day. “But I hope you guys have raingear,” the captain added with a grin.

Chris loaded the local radar on his smartphone, and heavy green streaks with red and yellow highlights surrounded the waters of Cape Lookout, but the storm’s winds were slated to hold off for another day at least.

I have a firm conviction that dealing with a little adversity on the water can only help out in the luck department. The storm’s wind was supposed to hold off for another day, so I happily loaded raingear and lunch aboard Kimrey’s 22’ Offshore center console and we took off for a spot in Bogue Sound where the three captains had been loading up on menhaden in the weeks prior to our trip.

We’d originally planned to capitalize on the often red-hot Cape Lookout cobia bite, but the fishing hadn’t been stellar over the past week, and Chris wanted to put a few grouper in the boat as insurance fish before beginning the search for a cobe. Neither Gary nor I had complaints about that, and after loading the “Mount Maker” with several dozen large “shad,” as locals call them, and after the aforementioned raincoat detour, we headed to Beaufort Inlet.

“I still haven’t decided whether to go to the east side of the shoals or the west,” Chris said after we’d cleared the inlet and began plugging along offshore. “I really want to fish the east, but I think the rain’s going to be worse over there.”

Another quick check of the radar confirmed the captain’s suspicions, as a gap in the precipitation was opening on the west side of Lookout Shoals.

Half an hour later, Chris throttled back on our first spot, still well within sight of the beach and the breakers crashing whitewater on the shoals.

“Let’s try a drop here,” Kimrey said, with a broken bottom that showed some promising signs of life visible on his sounder. “There could definitely be a cobia here, and we catch gags here, too.”

Gary and I each pinned menhaden to the heavy spinning rods Chris offered, and we sent them to the rocky seafloor less than 50’ below. The hookup was almost instant for the Publisher, but my bait went unmolested, and the amberjack Gary eventually muscled to the surface gave Chris all the reason he needed to head further offshore.

“How’s 11 more miles sound to you guys?” he asked, punching another rocky spot into the GPS.

With grouper on our brains, it sounded great, and we holstered our rods while Chris pointed the bow to the south.

The wind increased as we moved further from the beach, but Chris’s boat met the building chop beautifully, surprisingly so for a 22-footer, something I commented on around halfway into the ride.

“This thing’s basically an Intruder now,” he explained while we sliced through some more tightly-spaced 2-3 footers. “I was going to get another boat, but I liked this one so much Glen Rose (of Intruder Boats) and I rebuilt it—with about two or three times as much glass as it had in it.”

A few miles later, we pulled back at a large rocky area in 90’ of water that Chris found while fishing a king mackerel tournament a few years before and refocused our sights on groupers.

“Let’s drift this a time or two and see if we can’t find a grouper,” the captain said as we baited up the large circle hooks with lively menhaden.

Gary again was quick to hook up, this time with something that immediately began melting 65 lb. braid off the heavy drag on one of Chris’s Saltist spinners at an alarming pace. The fish wasn’t acting like an amberjack, and definitely wasn’t a grouper, as it had set a course and stuck to it as if on autopilot, swimming steadily to the southeast as though it wasn’t even hooked. Gary’s unseen adversary seemed to dislike it when he added a little more drag to the spinner, and if anything, sped up. The angler buttoned the drag down just a bit more, also to no appreciable effect except a frightening bend in his jigging rod.

An abrupt crack gave auditory confirmation that the angry creature was getting the best of things, and I glanced back to see 6” of splintered blank extending from the rod’s foregrip, an awed look on the newspaperman’s face, and line still pouring off the reel. The inevitable end to the tug of war came a moment later as the braid finally gave way, leaving us all wondering aloud what in the sea Gary could have hooked.

“It wasn’t acting like a shark,” Chris said, “but I don’t know what it could’ve been.”

“Good God, Gary. This reel’s got 35 lbs. of drag—did you use all of it?” he added mischievously after tugging a foot of braid off the reel.

The exciting struggle over, the captain set us up for a new drift across the bottom structure and set Gary up with a new outfit, with a few more sly insults thrown in.

Our next drift was where Gary began his ascent back to glory. While I almost immediately hooked up with a spunky jack, the boss’s bait met a different fate. His second rod of the day also took a wicked set, but the battle was a strictly vertical affair. This time the tackle held, and after a few moments of uncertainty about who’d been the winner, Gary clearly had the upper hand. Chris was soon sinking a gaff into the 13 lb. gag grouper firmly affixed to Gary’s circle hook, a sight I watched with a twinge of envy while my jack bulldogged back into the depths.

We finally released the AJ, and I snapped a few photos of Gary’s gag while Chris brought us back around to begin a new drift.

Sending down an identical pair of large menhaden on seemingly identical oversized Carolina rigs brought identical results as soon as Chris took the boat out of gear and let current and wind take control. Gary hooked another grouper, and I was fast to another jack. Well not exactly, as my jack turned out to be an almaco instead of an amberjack, but the brutal battle felt mighty similar. Gary was grinning over another (and larger) gag on deck by the time I got the almaco close enough for Chris to remove the hook from its jaw and send it on back to the structure below.

Fortunes had definitely reversed, and the needling Gary had been enduring since the raincoat incident morphed into loud marveling on part of captain and boss on my prowess at hooking jacks.

“You think if I try a dead one it’ll be easier to get through the jacks?” I asked Chris while he set up for the next drift.

“I think the grouper like a live bait better,” he replied, “but the jacks definitely do, so give it a shot.”

I chose a dead bait and sent it down, finally feeling the trap-door thump of a solid grouper bite soon after the rig hit the seafloor. I reeled the circle hook home and savored the fish’s attempts to get back to its rocky home, the home that would part the 100 lb. leader that bound fish and I together. The violent surges straight down grew a little more subdued as I was able to put a little of the braid back on the reel, and I gained ground with every turn of the handle until the brown shape of a healthy grouper materialized a few feet down in the water column. The fish was soon within reach of Chris’s 6’ gaff, and he wasted no time putting my gag in the boat.

I finally relaxed while holding my own redemption fish for a few photos, and though it was a respectable 10-pounder, I had to admit both Gary’s were larger. However, the thought of the grouper dinner in my future tempered that slight sting nicely.

“People say you have to anchor up to catch grouper,” Chris allowed after we’d iced the gags down. “What do you guys think?”

There was only one answer to that question, and with our three-man limit of gags cooling off in the Offshore’s forward fish box, it was time for a new strategy.

We motored inshore a bit to the Shad Boat, a wreck west of the shoals near the R6 buoy, and then headed to the Northwest Places, an area of broken bottom that attracts a variety of gamefish. Chris deployed menhaden on the surface and midway down the water column, and we made a drift of the entire area, but again, the cobia weren’t to be found.

Cruising a series of buoys and checking out a sea turtle also turned up no cobia, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying on the captain’s part, and his grouper backup plan had turned what would’ve been a slow day hoping for a single cobia bite into a banner day of ferocious battles and a pair of succulent fillets for each of us. To boot, the rain that threatened never actually fell on us, as the gap in the weather followed us everywhere we went, despite 360 degree views of ominous skies the entire day.

Chris grew up in Atlantic, NC, and has been fishing the waters around Cape Lookout his entire life. His expertise covers practically anything that lives in saltwater in North Carolina, from speckled trout and flounder to bluefin tuna and blue marlin, with a particular passion for live-baiting and bottom fishing.

Give him a call to talk about a charter at (252) 342-0464 or visit www.mountmakercharters.com to learn more.