Tidelines – August 8, 2013
Gary Hurley with a couple of the spanish mackerel he caught in the waters off Cape Point (the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is in the background if you look closely). He was casting a Clarkspoon downwind while fishing with Capt. Aaron Aaron of Tightline Charters out of Hatteras Harbor Marina.
“I luv a blue,” is uttered by over 50% of Capt. Aaron Aaron’s summer clientele when they call up his inshore charter business, Tightline Charters, to ask about inshore and nearshore fishing trips.
He operates a 24’ Kencraft tower boat out of Hatteras Harbor Marina, and most of the summer vacationers he sees come from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. “I luv a blue,” in my opinion, sounds best when I imagine it with a thick New Jersey accent.
So Aaron Aaron (yes, his first and last name are not only the same name but are spelled the same, too) puts the northerners on bluefish, and that’s also how my trip with him started this past week when Joshua Alexander (Fisherman’s Post salesman) and I drove out to the Outer Banks to take some relief from a busy summer schedule.
Our original plan was to sight cast to the big red drum that get on the flats inside Hatteras Inlet. However, all of the rainwater that had finally made its way across the Sound had muddied up the water, so the ability to spot schools of reds had been non-existent for a couple of days before our arrival. Bad water quality merely meant “Plan B” for Aaron, Joshua, and I, so on Monday morning when the ocean was calm and commercial fishermen had reported clean water and bait balls around the famous Cape Point, it made sense to head out the inlet and turn north.
“The Point and those shoals can be like SeaWorld,” Aaron told us as we idled out away from his corner dock space. Then he started reviewing all the tackle on the boat to help make sure Joshua and I were prepared for anything we might find out on the shoals.
There were two rods for cobia (one with a bucktail and worm and another with a plain bucktail), two for big reds (one with a large Hopkins and another with a large Storm soft plastic), two rods for casting to spanish and blues (one with a Stingsilver and another with a gold Johnson weedless spoon), two rods for trolling Clarkspoons for spanish and blues, and one rod with a float for the live menhaden and spot he had waiting in the livewell.
The bluefish were first, busting bait on the surface in the Hatteras Inlet “shortcut,” so we decided to get the skunk off of the boat early. We quickly cast to and caught as many blues as we wanted, and then headed for the waters just north of the old Frisco pier where spanish had been reported. The reports were accurate, as skying spanish gave us ample opportunity to load up a cooler by both casting and trolling.
Trolling Clarkspoons for spanish isn’t high skill level fishing, as Aaron is the first to recognize, but for me the spanish and the blues weren’t the main attraction anyway. I found myself mostly appreciating being in the Hatteras environment. I’ve caught spanish before, but on this trip I was catching them in the shadow of the iconic Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
And then moments later I was catching spanish and blues on Diamond Shoals as they extend away from Cape Point. The water ranged from 5-12’, and the different depths and shades of water—lightest shades up along the shoreline, then lighter and a little greener shades above the shoals, and then the deep blue shades as the shoals drop off into deeper water—that surrounded Cape Point that day were a visual I’ll keep for a long time.
I saw a large blacktip shark glide along in 3’ of water up along the shoreline, and then accelerate quickly and effortlessly away the moment my bucktail hit the water near him. We also spotted a leatherback turtle (huge), a loggerhead, some sandbar sharks, a single tarpon, osprey with a houndfish in their talons, and a ball of about 40 bluefish that ran at and under the front of the boat while I stood on the bow hooked to a spanish.
I saw up close how the waves on the Point act like a washing machine on even the calmest days, leaving it to my imagination how it must get stacked up on a fall day with a strong northeast wind.
Then there was the haunting sight of 4WD trucks relegated to a small stretch of beach between Buxton and Frisco, where in days prior to the Audubon Society’s grip on the National Parks Service the vehicles would have stretched all along Cape Point and down each coastline to the south and north.
My last visual memory of the day came on the back of the reef inside Hatteras Inlet. Aaron wanted to take a look despite the dirty water conditions that still persisted inside, and after about 20 minutes of idling around we finally found a school of about 100 of the citation-class red drum (a little hard to estimate given the conditions).
Wind and water kept us from getting any hookups, but the sight of numerous copper-colored big reds moving along in 4’ of water gave us reason to plan to come back soon, maybe during “crab fest” when the August full moon brings the blue crabs to the surface on both the incoming and outgoing tide.
So I may not “luv a blue” like New Jersey does, but I loved my time fishing the Hatteras area with Aaron.
