Tidelines – July 12, 2012
How far would you go to catch a speckled trout?
Would you leave Wilmington at 7:00 pm to start the two hour drive up to Beaufort? Would you check into a hotel room a little after 9:00 pm, set the alarm clock for 3:15 am, and then watch TV and try to get tired enough to catch at least a few hours of sleep before the alarm goes off?
How about waking up at 3:15 to drive a little less than 30 minutes to meet the captain in his driveway, hopping in his truck to drive another 40 or so minutes before getting to the South River boat ramp, and then making a 20-30 minute run by boat (a 23’ Venture bay boat and the wind is blowing 20-ish mph) to be at the trout hole before the sun comes up?
And just to be clear with this questionnaire—the speckled trout you will catch will be no bigger than 16 inches (in fact, most will be just under the legal size limit), you won’t keep any trout to take home to eat, and when you get off the water you’ll have to rush to get back to Wilmington by 1:00 so you can still try to put in close to a full day of work before knocking off around 9:00 that evening.
My answer is a definite “yes,” and I would do it again. And just to be clear with my answer—I would do it again as long as it was with Capt. Charlie Brown of Old Core Sound Guide Service.
I could pretend to explain my answer by offering that traveling to fish comes with the job description at Fisherman’s Post. In addition, what angler hasn’t logged only a few hours of sleep before getting up to be at the boat before sunrise?
The real reason for my willingness to go to great lengths for modest speckled trout, though, lies in the man Charlie Brown.
When I pulled into his driveway at 3:45, Charlie was already standing in his front doorway, cup of coffee in hand, waving me to park and come on in to get a cup for myself. I said I was concerned about the winds that were already up, and he told me in his Harker’s Island Brogue that he wasn’t worried a bit about the wind and that we would catch “gobs of fish.”
The drive to South River was spent as most friends do when it’s been a while since they’ve been together. Charlie told me of family deaths and weddings, plans to add hardwood floors and a wraparound deck to the house, and the instructions he got from his most recent trip to the doctor (the standard: lose weight, eat healthy, and drink less, but what was remarkable was it sounded like Charlie believed he was going to follow the advice this time). Mine was mostly about life with a newborn in the house.
On the run out to “The Barge,” a mostly sunken barge off of the mouth of Turnagain Bay, the conversation turned to fishing, as Charlie drove by other trout holes, pointed out on the chart different shoals he liked for the late summer big red drum bite, and described a place on the other side of the water where he had recently spotted a school of 100+ tarpon.
Once anchored, Charlie started showing me the day’s gear. He had close to 15 rods on the boat for our morning trout trip because (as he explains) Charlie doesn’t like to tie a knot on the boat. We threw a lot of Brown Lures (www.brownlures.com), a soft plastic that’s hot in Texas but hard to come by in North Carolina, but his most impressive collection has to be in MirrOlures. He had 250+ MirrOlures on the boat that day, and his bigger boxes of MR17’s, the 52 series, and old 7M’s were back at the house.
And while Charlie is more familiar (and successful) with MirrOlures than any captain I’ve fished with, he may be just as well versed in Pro-Cure. His most recent application is mixing the Inshore Saltwater Formula Super Gel with an Anise Oil—the Gel is thicker and stays on longer, while the Oil is lighter and disperses quicker, so Charlie mixes the two for best results.
And the results came in the first couple of casts. None of the trout had any size to them on this morning, but I wasn’t complaining. A day on the water with Charlie Brown is always a fishing memory.
On the drive back to his house he spoke of a “bumper crop of trout” due to the mild winter with no real freezes. He interrupted himself to point out a 4-foot copperhead on the side of the road, and then went on to tell me that there have been more trout this year than he’s seen in at least three years and that “the numbers are thar.”
So that’s my answer to how far I’d travel to catch a speckled trout.
