Tidelines – May 8, 2014
Capt. Danile Jarvis (left), of Flat Foot Fishing Charters out of Topsail, and Ron Jarvis (father) with a couple of the bonito they caught at Diver’s Rock. They were hooking the fish by trolling Yo-Zuri Deep Divers and casting diamond jigs.
Heading out of New River Inlet with expectations of active bonito just a short boat ride off the beach heralds (for me) the end of my teaching semester and the soon-to-be start of summer. And my welcomed partner in this annual tradition for the past three years has been Capt. Daniel Jarvis of Flat Foot Charters out of the Topsail area.
An open window for me to get away was going to be hard to produce, as this year for the first time we hosted a spring surf fishing tournament on Topsail Island (see article on page 30), but a strategically unused “personal day” from Cape Fear Community College gave me a Monday out of the classroom (I was scheduled to lecture that day on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman) to join Daniel and his father for a morning of trolling and casting.
Surprisingly, we were the only vehicles at North Topsail’s high rise bridge that morning, and (again surprisingly) we were one of only a few boats working the area around Diver’s Rock.
These pleasant surprises, though, were balanced with the predictable. I could have predicted that Daniel was going to show up in a great mood with a clean, well-organized boat already rigged for the morning’s adventure. And I also could have predicted that we were going to catch bonito quickly.
No one was timing, but it had to have been less than four minutes before the first trolling rod bounced over and announced a hooked fish.
Daniel’s father, Ron, makes bonito fishing with Daniel a yearly tradition, too, driving almost 300 miles from Dudley Shoals, NC, to have his son put him on speedy little tunas. Daniel and Ron had been fishing the past couple of days with success, but still they were at least a little surprised that our livewell was already holding a 5 lb. bonito and we hadn’t yet made it over to the place where we really wanted to fish that morning.
And I think that the “easy” paired with the exciting is why I welcome the bonito run every spring. By April my CFCC teaching load, paired with fishing schools, boat shows, early season newspapers, and tournament preparations, has me pretty tapped out, so I welcome a fishery that is easy to get to and is at least somewhat automatic (as automatic as fishing ever is).
Then the “easy” is complemented by the exciting rush of diving birds, surface disruptions, and feeding bonito. Sometimes the fracas happens suddenly and right by the boat, and other times the temptation is to “run-and-gun” for fish out of casting range.
On this particular Monday morning, the troll was producing better than the cast. I don’t know how many times I pulled something metal and flashy through feeding fish only to have my lure come back unmolested. The Yo-Zuri Deep Divers, though, just kept on producing throughout the morning.
And it’s that steady production that reminds me of a third reason why bonito fishing is a special fishery—bonito sashimi is delicious.
Yes, the bonito fishery is where easy meets exciting: meet at the ramp with plenty of parking, quick boat ride out while getting to know Ron, put a Yo-Zuri in the water and immediately get bit—repeat, cast a diamond jig to working birds and get bit—repeat, fill up a cooler, be back in by mid-morning, and trim fillets of all blood lines/chill/eat.
And now (predictably) I’m going to urge you to contact Capt. Daniel Jarvis of Flat Foot Charters (ad copy on this page) to book your own trip, whether it’s bonito or red drum or flounder or any number of species that he targets throughout the year. Tell him you want the 5-minute guarantee (a fish in the box within five minutes of fishing). I doubt he’ll give it to you, but at least he’ll know you read about him in Fisherman’s Post.
