Tidelines – June 16, 2011
The cobia fishing is winding down for the season on the Outer Banks, so this past week I put together a quick trip to do some sight casting for the tasty brown fish.
My regular readers will remember a couple of weeks ago when I talked about a Harkers Island cobia tournament where we didn’t catch a single cobia. And I’m not just talking about the boat I was on. The entire tournament failed to weigh-in the target species. So I’ve had a strong itch to pull against a brute cobia, and a long time friend living in Nags Head was offering the solution.
Capt. Donnie Davis, of DOA Charters out of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, is an old college buddy of mine from the East Carolina University days. We ran around in some of the same circles, played a little half-court basketball together, but I don’t think that in any of our four years together (okay, it was ECU, so I was 4+ years) did the word “fish” come up in any of our conversations.
Donnie was fishing regularly back then, traveling to the Outer Banks as well as to his home town of Chesapeake, but in college I was much more interested in chasing a piece of plastic around on the Ultimate Frisbee field.
Since the late 80s, Donnie has completed Ph.D. work in Coastal Resource Management, then worked on and off as a mate on a big boat, got his captain’s license in 1996, has been chartering on his own for the past 11 years, and has been working out of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center (an established fishing institution that doesn’t let just anyone into their tight knit circle) for 9 of those years.
Earlier this year when I traveled to the Outer Banks to scout out Fisherman’s Post’s “new territory,” Donnie and I got together and he told me to find some time in early June and we would go out and sight cast bucktails to cobia, by far his favorite type of fishing.
So with that invitation, I did what any smart person would do. I showed up on Donnie’s door in early June ready to climb into the tower and scout for cobia cruising along the beach.
My regular readers also will note that lately an ongoing theme of mine has been the entire experience of fishing trips and not just the fish count. DOA Charters satisfied the fish count and put me on fish, including cobia in the 20-50 lb. class. The heaviest went 47 lbs., an even more solid fish count considering that the bite has tapered down considerably from late May.
Aside from the fish, though, one of my favorite memories from the trip was just going under the Herbert C. Bonner Bridge and heading out of Oregon Inlet. This trip with Donnie was my first time fishing by boat out of this famed inlet.
Then there were the hours spent in the tower, taking in the majority of the fishing day from the tower’s fresh and elevated perspective. Spotting cobia, like most valuable skills, is something that takes time and practice to develop. It was fairly easy to spot brown objects moving along just below the surface, but it took a lot more time to be able to quickly separate the brown rays from the brown cobia.
And in the backdrop of us spotting mostly singles and doubles (first throwing bucktails and only if the bucktails were dismissed would we then try to entice with a live eel), Donnie and I passed the time with conversations that ranged from our kids’ struggles with swimming lessons, to the superiority of a can of Coca-Cola as compared to a plastic bottle, to his evolving taste in music (he and his tattooed friends used to listen to punk but now they’re listening to “alternative” country).
As a first-timer out of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, I even enjoyed coming back to dock and having a deck hand put my fish in a big plastic trashcan. I got my fish ticket, and then headed over to the fish cleaning station to wait for my boat name to be called.
You can call Capt. Donnie Davis, of DOA Charters out of the Oregon Inlet Fishing Center, directly at (252) 202-5565, but I encourage you to first check out his website at www.doacharters.com. I’m comfortable saying it’s unlike any charter boat website you’ve ever visited.
And when I get back to the Outer Banks in July, I hope to once again head out under the Bonner Bridge to begin my second memory out of Oregon Inlet.
