SE NC Report---Hot Women and Some Nice Macks

**Squid** · 10-08-2007 06:51 PM

All last week, I had a female friend in town from Kentucky for a little visit...

She had been saltwater fishing a couple times in Hawaii but never had a bite and has never caught anything bigger than a 8 inch rainbow trout before in her life. Well, as luck would have it the wind decided it was going to HOWL all week making an offshore trip impossible. (Her favorite fish is wahoo and I really wanted to catch a few...)
Finally on Thursday we got a bit of a break when the wind dropped a bit and switched to more out of the N/NE instead of the NE/E. I knew that the "home waters" around Wilmington would still be too rough to fish so I made the call to go fish my old "home waters" out of Ocean Isle Beach. There had been a very good beach bite of king mackerel going on for a couple of weeks so that was going to be the plan. Made a call to some friends and they agreed to let me run their boat "The Job Site" and work all the bugs out of it since they would be fishing it in the US Open the following two days.
Set out really early and got the boat dropped in around 7am. After we finally got it all loaded up it was now a little after 8 and a little later than I wanted to leave but none the less we were underway. Luckily the rain held off of us and stayed offshore so we busted through the inlet to search for some pogies. For the few days leading up to Thursday, pogies had been "no problem" off of OIB so I made a right turn out of the inlet and began the search. Ended up running all the way down to Little River Inlet with still no pogies to be found.
Ok, I'm not running all over creation since I know that the bait is here somewhere. (It was very cloudy/rainy that morning and when this is the case, it usually takes bait a long time to come to the top.)
Plan B.....rigged up some spanish rods and trolled our way back towards Shallotte Inlet waiting on the bait to show and hopefully catching a few spanish/blues in the process----the spanish for supper and the blues for bait. We managed to succeed at part of the equation as the spanish were willing to cooperate.
Now it's a little before lunch and there's a few dozen boats out looking for bait with nobody seeing them. Then a call comes over the radio that the pogies were on the east side of Shallotte Inlet. Since we were about a mile away, we picked up our stuff and hauled tater up to them. Sure enough there were a TON of mudballs and about 15 boats throwing on them however nobody was coming up with bait----not suprising since the mudballs were in 25-30 feet of water. Always being one to go against the grain, I moved inshore of all the mudballs and hit the JACKPOT! Found a huge mudball in there however this was more than just a mudball. It was a cloud of pogies doing something that I've never seen pogies do before. They were not flipping.....instead they were acting as a whirlpool and had the entire water churned up! One throw of a 12 foot net and I was looking at several hundred JUMBO pogies in the cockpit of the 33' Palmetto center console.

After filling my livewell, I made a call to my friends that were in the area and handed them all the bait they needed for the day's fishing. After that I made a lap around all the boats still throwing in 30 feet of water and also gave them all the bait they needed. Ended up donating bait to 6 boats giving them all they needed as well as keeping enough for 2 days work for myself.
Finally after all this it was time to clean up and get to fishing. By now it's almost 1:00pm and a storm is brewing just offshore. I put them in anyway and watched as the storm dissipated and never got to us. After I got the lines set, I was telling Andrea what to look for and what is going to happen when a fish bites. One of the lines out of my mouth was:
"Keep an eye on this flat line bait. You can see both of the baits on the rig (double pogy rig) swimming right there----when a fish hits that one, you'll either see him or hear the splash before it takes off. So just keep an eye on that line...."
No more than 5 minutes after I got that out of my mouth a fish skies on the flat line!

She watched in amazement as it missed the first time and came back and skied a second time! This time it had the bait in his mouth hanging out of both sides but yet still managed to not get hooked. When the rod didn't immediately take off, I dropped it to freespool and he came back to eat. Andrea watched as line peeled off the reel. She had never seen line disappear like this and this fish didn't stop till over half of the 400 yards of 20 lb. line were gone. Got the lines in and eased toward the fish. During the fight the fish managed to wrap himself in the double pogy rig and managed to kill himself during the ordeal. Anyway, after 15 minutes her first "real" saltwater fish--a solid 25 lb. kingfish was in the cockpit. (I'm not counting the spanish.....) The fish managed to wear her down pretty well but she was not ready to quit yet.
I put the lines back out starting with the downrigger. As I was setting the second line (the long line), the downrigger pops and we're tight again! "Already?!" "Yep! Get your belt back on!

" Andrea made quick work of this one and now we have a 18 lb fish to go along with the first.
Put them back out and managed to get them all set before we whiffed on both fish of a double header. Get reset and she lets me catch the next one---about the same size as her first but not quite as fat. Probably around 22-23 lbs. Missed another fish after mine and it's only 3:00. I really wanted her to catch one more and at 3:15 another fish came knocking. Again, Andrea made quick work of this one and another 17-18 lb. fish was in the bag.
After this one, she was pretty whooped and there was a little bit of work to be done on the boat before tournament day (namely clean up since it was sitting outside for about two months without being used......see pictures below

)
Ended up with 7 bites, catching 4 of them between 17-25 lbs. Not too bad for a little over 2 hours of fishing. And all of this happened between 28-32 feet of water no more than 3/4 of a mile east of Shallotte Inlet. Needless to say that she is HOOKED on saltwater fishing now......just have to get her back in town for another visit!

On the tournament scene the following day, my buddies, Lee, Jason, and Nathan scored on a 36.35 lb fish to finish 8th in the US Open. Great job guys!