Tidelines – March 2024
When I pulled in to the North Topsail boat ramp off Shrimp Lady Lane, just a hint of sunlight was visible, but it was easy to know from memory where the single vehicle parking spots to the right were located as you first pull into the launch area. I was meeting up with Capt. Allen Jernigan, of Breadman Ventures Guide Service, for a morning of sight casting to redfish on a relatively cold February morning that was supposed to warm up quickly.
My December fishing trips had been scarce and January trips nonexistent, so I was more than a little excited watching Allen move a dozen rods from the back of his truck into the rod holders that flanked the console. He had an assortment of topwaters, weedless soft plastics, suspended hard baits, and spoons, and with two Power Poles on the back of a SCB 22 Stingray powered by a Mercury Marine 300 V-8 and the boat stereo already playing Pantera, I felt like I had already won the morning.
Allen was confident that we would sight plenty of fish, but he wasn’t positive that the fish would behave the way he wanted.
Gary Hurley, of Fisherman’s Post, holds up one of the redfish he pulled out of a school of hundreds using a 4″ Saltwater Assassin soft plastic. He was sight casting behind Topsail Island with Capt. Allen Jernigan, of Breadman Ventures Guide Service.
“The schools will be sitting still this morning,” he told me, “because the water temperature is 50 degrees, we have a southwest wind turning, and it’s going to warm up real fast. Those factors will put the reds in ‘suspended animation’ behavior. They’re likely to just be sitting there. We could find fish by hooking them, seeing them, seeing them move, or coming up on them unexpectedly and making them move.”
We idled past some docks in the middle section of a bay, and he pointed out a ripple between two docks and a slight push of water on a shoreline. He wanted to give these areas time to settle and forget about us before approaching them, so as we came to a spot where he had been finding fish regularly, he grabbed a couple of rods to make sure we were ready as soon as we came within casting range.
I was armed with a Stillwater rod, a custom rod made by Allen’s redfish tournament partner Jason Dail, that had a Saltwater Assassin Shrimp Cocktail 4” soft plastic rigged weedless, and Allen opted for the 4” Sea Shad, and he lathered both with blue crab-scented Pro-Cure.
“I like Saltwater Assassin because they work,” he explained, “and we’re going weedless to help keep the moss off and we’ll be around some rocks and structure.”
My instructions were simple enough—bump, bump, sit a little bit, bump, bump, sit a little bit—but still I watched Allen’s retrieve so I could best mock his style. I quickly noticed that his “sit a little bit” was a very little bit, and he explained that when covering water to find fish, he speeds up the retrieve slightly, and then slows it down once he’s confirmed that redfish are in the area.
“We’re going to cover water, expecting them in some way to show themselves,” Allen continued, “and hopefully we see them before they get up and move.”
Allen found that confirmation when he quickly hooked our first redfish of the day, an under-slot hanging close to a dock and more towards the shoreline. The bite was subtle, he advised, and then told me to cast right where that first fish came from.
He hooked another, and then I hooked a couple, and as all of these first fish were roughly the same 16-inches, we moved outside to target the water between the next two docks in the hopes we would find bigger fish willing to bite.
We were bombing long casts in the gin-clear water to cover the area, and we were methodical and patient with bump, bump, sit a little bit. However, we found no fish in this section of water.
“We’re going to head back to the first spot and come back through and try again,” Allen said, and once again we caught another under-slot in the same location where we found our first fish.
This time, though, Allen wanted to get closer to see this school of fish in the water column.
As we started moving up through the open water between the docks, we suddenly found ourselves on top of a huge mass of fish. They were, as Allen had predicted, in “suspended animation.” They had been there the whole time. They just hadn’t given any indication of their presence until we bumped them.
This school of several hundred red drum moved away from us, but they didn’t move away nervously or anxiously. They just meandered off in different directions, some heading under the second dock, some out to deeper water, and some pushed past us and headed for the dock we just left.
Allen looked at the fish as a problem that needed to be solved, but I stood quiet in the bow of his boat and enjoyed the impressive sight of hundreds of reds ranging in size from 16-30 inches moving through shallow, clear water.
Capt. Allen Jernigan, of Breadman Ventures Guide Service, with a slot red drum hooked on a soft plastic while sight fishing behind Topsail Island.
We threw our baits in all the different directions the fish were headed, and while we found a couple of fish that were willing to cooperate (and a couple of those fish were the bigger fish), most of our retrieves came right through the schools and back to us. These fish, that didn’t act scared or spooked, gave us seemingly random bites once in a while, but for the most part they were just not interested.
As we snapped a couple of photos of our slot fish, I could tell that Allen, a guide that wants his guests to catch fish more than the guests want to catch fish, struggled with “only” producing 5-6 reds for each of us that morning, but I focused on the visual pleasure of seeing school after school of redfish, as well as sighting some large speckled trout and a school of black drum.
I also looked at hooking 5-6 reds as much more of a February win than Allen did, but that mentality is part of what makes Allen so successful and a sought-after guide in the Topsail area.
Allen’s prediction of how we would find fish came true, just as his concerns over weather changes and rising air pressure had come true. And as we were saying goodbye, he predicted that his charter for tomorrow would be a 40-50 fish day. A 2:30 pm text that following day confirmed that this prediction, too, had come true.
Capt. Allen Jernigan, of Breadman Ventures Guide Service, clearly knows a thing or two about red drum, so if you think that seeing several hundred red drum being active in shallow water and hooking at least a handful of them sounds like a good time, then I encourage you to visit him at www.breadmanventures.com or call him at (910) 467-1482.
A boat rocking to Black Label Society while humming at 50+ mph to the next location? I call that bonus value.
Allen’s text alerts set to the sound of R2-D2? I’m not sure what to call that.
