Tidelines – July 16, 2015
Lately my flounder fishing has been mostly off the beach bouncing a bucktail/Gulp, so it was a welcome change when Max and I made plans with Capt. Mark Register, of Playin’ Hooky Charters, to pursue flounder inshore exclusively on live bait.
Max Gaspeny (left) and Gary Hurley with a red drum and two of the flounder they caught while fishing live bait inshore in the Southport area. They were fishing the Southport waterfront, area creeks, and the lower Cape Fear River with Capt. Mark Register of Playin’ Hooky Charters.
Mark runs his charter business out of the Southport/Oak Island area, so the live bait plan was even more attractive knowing that we would be targeting some well-known, summer flounder haunts: the Southport waterfront, area creeks, and the lower Cape Fear River.
Our trip, like most of Mark’s, started at the Wildlife boat ramp on Fish Factory Road, and we only had to ease a little up the creek to the nearby basin (probably now filled more with abandoned sailboats than manned ones) where we found our menhaden flips in the deeper water and schools of mullet cruising the surface along the shoreline between patches of grass.
Our livewell was full, but we didn’t yet have the tide Mark wanted for the waterfront. As we were still on the last hour of the fall, we hit a spot or two in Wildlife Creek (producing a couple of short ones) and then moved to the first of many waterfront docks as the tide began its rise and started to move again.
On this hot July day, the Southport waterfront cooperated with us in numbers but not with size. We found plenty of flatfish, but few were over 15”, common for March fishing in Southport but odd for summer. We pulled three off one dock and then four off another, and then moved on to other docks where we landed even more fish, but the Southport waterfront on this day was just not producing the quantity of 2+ lb. flatfish that we were hoping for (and had come to expect from Southport in the summertime).
If we were tournament fishing, then Mark would have anchored up at one of his favorite docks and just waited out the day, confident that at some point during the tide cycle a big flounder or two would find our baits. But we weren’t tournament fishing, so Mark used the day as an opportunity to visit other areas synonymous with Southport flounder fishing.
From the waterfront we moved on to the ADM dock (where we caught a few undersized fish and broke off a couple of big ones). Then we targeted “the wall,” the grates that filter water headed to cool the nuclear plant. “The wall” used to be more productive, back in the day when you could actually stand on the wall and fish both sides of the grates. That was also the time when Capt. Jimmy Price was rumored to post up on “the wall” for days on end in efforts to win local tournaments and the US Anglers year-long competition (picture him on the wall with rods stretched out wide in both directions so no other anglers could move in and fish those same waters).
Though “the wall” no longer offers the size and quantity of fish to match the ones from those fabled days, on our day it produced the biggest fish of the day. Max brought to net a 21” flattie (estimated at 3.5 lbs.), but unfortunately right after bringing the fish to net, a workboat on the other side started raising grates to be scraped and pressure washed, and we didn’t hook another fish there after the work had begun.
Our run from “the wall” was not very long, as we next anchored up on some holes in the Snow’s Marsh area. Once again the flounder bit for us, but once again the majority of them were small. Fortunately, to give us relief from the smaller flounder, a red drum took my mullet minnow a second after splashing down along a grass bank. I enjoyed a classic red drum battle, the fish taking several runs away from the boat and then finishing its battle by using the current to try to make itself heavy.
Mark was open to continue our tour of Southport flounder fishing spots, but responsibilities waiting back in Wilmington meant we had to end our day. Max and I took the flounder home and left the red drum for Mark and his wife, and we made a plan to fish together again soon, whether it’s another day of inshore flounder fishing, or perhaps heading just off the beach where Mark finds consistent results with big red drum and flounder.
If Southport/Oak Island inshore and nearshore fishing is your desire (or Mark is also rigged and ready to take clients off the beach for kings, mahi, and sharks), then Capt. Mark Register of Playin’ Hooky Charters should be your call (or visit him online—see ad copy this page).
And to finish with a Wide Open Tech Spanish Mackerel plug, you could also have Mark show you how to fish for those big spanish just off the Oak Island beachfront. He live baits for them using scaled-down king mackerel rigs and finds plenty of big spanish throughout the summer and into the fall. Then you could use that knowledge to win some cash and prizes in the Wide Open Tech Spanish Mackerel Open, Fisherman’s Post’s annual spanish mackerel tournament.
The majority of boats last year fished right off of Wrightsville Beach so they had a quick run to the scales (this year the scales will be at Dockside Restaurant and Marina), but there were also a number of boats that fished off Oak Island and then cruised up the river to the weigh-in (they dropped a person off in Southport to drive the trailer up to Wrightsville Beach so the boat didn’t have to make the run through the ICW and river back to Southport).
I hope to see you at the Wide Open Tech Spanish Mackerel Open. My three boys (ages 9, 8, and 3) and I will fishing again this year, and (hopefully) we will once again have something to weigh in so that they can get up on stage and receive their SMO medal (every kid on a boat that weighs in a fish gets a medal).
