Tidelines – October 8, 2015
Our surf fishing tournament anglers are a hearty lot, and I’m sure we would have had a number of them still show up to fish this past weekend in spite of the attention Hurricane Joaquin was getting, but for the first time in Fisherman’s Post history we found it necessary to postpone one of our surf fishing events.
The Topsail Fall Surf & Pier Fishing Challenge, originally scheduled for October 2-4, has now been moved to the weekend of November 6-8. The call was made on the Thursday morning before the event, primarily due to the unpredictability at that time of Joaquin’s path, as well as the numerous beach access closures in Surf City and the reported damage to the beach in North Topsail.
Dave Bullard and Derek King with a pair of citation-class red drum that bit spot heads off Jolly Roger Pier in late September.
And in looking over the storm coverage for the past few days, I would say that our call to postpone on that Thursday morning was the right call to make.
Just about everything about the event, except the dates, will be the same—registration on Friday, fishing round the clock from midnight on Friday until noon on Sunday, and then a big awards dinner and ceremony on Sunday starting at noon. There will be one change, though, and it has to do with our southern boundary.
Tim Chavez with a citation red drum he caught and released off Seaview Fishing Pier after it bit a spot head.
We had been using the house on Lea Island as part of the determination of the southern surf boundary (lining it up with buoys in the inlet), but high seas and waves over the weekend collapsed the structure leaving only a few pilings still standing. Redefining a southern boundary will be an easy task. Other changes will probably include taking pompano off of the leaderboard (that would be a tough bite to count on in November) and replacing it with spot or pufferfish.
Even though weather and hard conditions forced Fisherman’s Post to cancel its official fishing plans over this past weekend on Topsail, the island did enjoy something of an unprecedented bite (at least unprecedented in the time we’ve been covering southern North Carolina) starting with the nor’easter weekend that soaked the area and brought in rough seas prior to Juaquin’s weekend.
All three of Topsail’s piers have been putting citation-class red drum on the planks for over a week now. And they’re not just bringing up a couple of big fish, but numbers of big fish.
Bob Gardner caught and released this citation red drum off Surf City Pier after it bit a large cut bait.
Max Gaspeny, our Editor, put in his time this past week, mostly on Jolly Roger Pier. He was part of the first weekend where Jolly Roger landed 50 big reds in two days (30 on Sunday and 20 on Monday). And he was also there on Friday when the pier crew landed 12 more.
I had my chance to be in on the more recent Friday action, running into Max at East Coast Sports as he picked up more 8 and 10 oz. sinkers to try and hold a fresh spot head on the bottom as Joaquin continued to increase wave height. However, I headed back to Wilmington for Friday date night (no fishing glory), and Max went back to Jolly Roger Pier to battle the 8’ (and still growing) waves that were breaking out in front of the pier to land five fish himself that night (fishing glory).
The best bite on the pier, predictably, was the northeast corner of the pier, and the goal when casting was to get your bait out as far as possible (it often seemed that the furthest bait out would get bit first). Of course, if you were going to cast off that northeast corner where several lines were already out, then a prerequisite was the ability to cast straight.
And even now, as I finish drafting my Tidelines column, reports are coming in about more fish being landed not only on all of the Topsail piers, but on the Wrightsville and Carolina Beach piers as well.
It very well may be too late to get in on this bite by the time you read this article, but you won’t truly know unless you go and put in the time. And I can promise that you will miss the bite if you decide against fishing so that you can go out for an overpriced meal and watch a corny “chick flick” movie.
