Tournament Report – Riley Rods Redfish Shootout
Posting back-to-back first places finishes in the first two events of the Riley Rods Redfish Shoutout, Corey Durako and Richard Gilligan—team “Chasin’ Gingers”—scaled a pair of red drum totaling 12.26 lbs. to take home the title in Event #2 of the season-long series.
Fishing together aboard a 19’ Pathfinder bay boat, Durako credited an interesting strategy with the pair’s success in the first two events.
Richard Gilligan and Corey Durako, the “Chasin’ Gingers” fishing team, with the pair of red drum weighing 12.26 lbs. that easily earned them first place in the Riley Rods Redfish Shootout Series Event #2. Both their fish fell for soft plastic baits in the lower Cape Fear River.
“We’ve never really drum fished before this year,” he explained. “We’ve trout fished hard for 10 years, though, and run into drum all the time doing that. I started looking at the winning weights in the drum tournaments and figured we could put up 12 lbs. pretty easy most days. A lot of the drum guys don’t know about the schools we’re fishing because they’re in trout spots—some of them are in 10’ of water.”
After pre-fishing in the days leading up to the tournament, the anglers had identified several schools of reds in the lower Cape Fear River they wanted to return to on the morning of the competition.
“We had one school of about 60 fish we hit pre-fishing,” Durako said. “Every slot one we stuck was between 5.5 and 7.25 lbs.”
The anglers found the schools with relative ease on the morning of the event, but found the fish not nearly as cooperative as they’d been before the tournament.
“I don’t know what happened, but those fish weren’t eating right,” the winning captain continued. “I bet somebody fished them that week. We really had to slow down and finesse them into biting.”
The crew’s subtle tactics were able to tempt some bites from the reds, however, and the second fish Durako put in the boat ended up being the 6.13 lb. red that was the event’s largest single fish.
Over the course of the morning and early afternoon, the anglers kept working the school, landing a few fish on weedless spoons but hooking most on Gulp baits crept slowly along the bottom.
“We’d come in on those fish on the trolling motor,” Durako went on, “and Power Pole down and let the baits just sit in front of them.”
The anglers made a few short moves over the course of their fishing day, but they stuck with the same school of fish the entire time.
“Sometimes we’d catch one and the school would move a hundred yards down the bank,” Durako said. “We followed them back and forth the whole time.”
With the six-pounder in the livewell, the pair culled their kicker fish each time they landed a larger one until Durako landed another fish over 6 lbs. early in the afternoon.
“I caught that last one right before we left,” Durako said.
As it turned out, the culling proved unnecessary, as their two fish combined bested their nearest competitors by over 5 lbs.
Capts. Mike Hoffman and Lee Parsons scaled the second place bag, a pair of reds weighing 7.24 lbs. Lee Padrick and Dwayne Smith were hot on their heels, scaling a 7.20 lb. aggregate to round out the top three.
More information on the Redfish Shootout Series and standings can be found at www.redfishshootoutseries.com.
