Friday, October 07, 2005
Surfing for fall fish
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C.--Shining silver in the afternoon sun, the lure arced gracefully through the breeze and hit the churning Atlantic surf with plop.
Dale Henderson started reeling, twitching the jig to simulate a fleeing bait fish.
"There are so many trout out there, it doesn't matter what color you use," he said.
The cast didn't produce a fish, but plenty of earlier tosses had. Henderson figured he had beached 15 speckled trout Sunday morning. Most were small, but one was a fat 3-pounder.
Henderson knew it was only a matter of time before he hooked into another big trout. That's fishing on the Outer Banks in the fall, when it's not a matter of if you'll get into exciting action, but a matter of when.
"It is just the right time of year to be doing this," said Henderson, a 53-year-old longtime resident of Kill Devil Hills.
Autumn is arguably the best fishing season along North Carolina's coast.
Popular game fish species are abundant as their migration patterns take them along the coast. Cooling water temperatures and shorter days trigger intense feeding activity among those fish.
As a bonus, the weather is often comfortable and the hordes of tourists that crowded summertime beaches have headed back to their inland lives.
That leaves the beaches, the piers and the charter boats to the more serious fishermen.
Doris Marsh is one of the die-hards.
An energetic 70, she gets a twinkle in her eyes when she talks about the excitement of fishing in the fall.
"You can catch spot, sea mullet, flounder, bluefish, Spanish mackerel, triggerfish, spadefish, black drum, speckled trout, gray trout," she said. "Oh, and stripers and red drum."
Once a serious surf angler, Marsh now fishes mostly from piers.
"Surf fishing is a lot of work," she said.
Marsh spent Sunday morning at the Avalon Pier in Kill Devil Hills. An abundance of seaweed in the water was making for tough fishing.
"I got one small trout earlier," she said. "I've gotten lots of bites its just hard to hook them with all the grass."
Like many fall fishermen, Marsh takes advantage of the typically good fall action to stock her freezer.
"A lot of my fish, I'll freeze and give to my son, who lives in Ashville," she said.
Pier fishing isn't just about putting a bunch of fish on ice, Marsh said.
She likes the camaraderie.
"You meet a lot of nice people," she said. "But you get a few who don't fit in."
Marsh laughed when she told the story about a man who stormed off when he learned that Marsh's husband, who doesn't fish much, cleans his wife's catch.
Marsh said she sees many of same people day after day, year after year. She recently ran into a visitor from Ohio. She met the man last year, and offered him some fishing tips.
"He came up to me and said, 'You were the only one who helped me,'" Marsh said.
Some locals are tight-lipped, but there is one group of experts who are willing to share information.
"The people at the bait and tackle shops will tell you where they are and what they're hitting," Marsh said.
It's in their best interest to put customers on fish, Marsh pointed out, because satisfied customers will be return customers.
Good fall action along the Outer Banks will run beyond November.
Speckled trout are providing a bulk of the surf-fishing action now. Small saltwater panfish, such as spot, croakers and whiting, will be around for another month. Small red drum, which are often called puppy drum, are also scattered throughout the breakers.
Striped bass action should start picking up in the surf in the coming weeks as schools of the fish migrate south along the beach. Schools of bluefish can show up any time, although the voracious fighters don't blitz the beach as often as they once did.
Each time Mahmoud Elnahal heads out with his tackle, he wonders if it he'll encounter a blitz like the one he came upon years ago.
"I was looking from my window and the birds were all going into the water," said Elnahal, a Richmond resident who also owns a home on the Outer Banks. "The whole beach was covered with fish that the bluefish had chased up on shore. It was unbelievable.
"I caught five big blues and the only reason I didn't catch more was I broke off my lure."
Fishing Sunday morning from the Avalon pier, Elnahal wasn't having that kind of luck. Instead of fish, his casts were producing clumps of seaweed.
"Sometimes it's good," he said. "And sometimes it's bad."
But even when it's bad, good is just around the corner.
