First, second and third-hand reports 11/15/2011
First hand, first.
I hit the Topsail/Wrightsville area Sunday afternoon and evening, during a window of favorable winds this past weekend. First the good news – the beaches are loaded up with beautiful soft structure – seems like there is a cut every 100 yards of so along the beach. At Topsail anyway, these are definitely high tide holes, as they are nearly exposed at low tide, but perfectly setup around high. On the not-so-good side, the beachfront was fairly lifeless.
I found a couple of small schools of tiny blues and tinier jacks in a few of the sloughs on south Topsail Island during the afternoon and could see groups of small sea mullet scurrying along the bottom in the wash. They would hit fresh shrimp when I would tip my tandem speck jig, but were too small to hook. I made quick scouting stops at a couple likely locations further up the beach around sunset but didn’t find any action. Piers looked slow as well.
After dark, I was able to coax up a couple respectable trout in the 17-18″ range. However, the action was slow: besides a small blue that ran off with my purple demon mirrolure, those were the only hits I had in several hours of high-falling tide fishing. Oh, I did have one more hit – by a rouge wave that knocked me down. The bad thing about the great, warm fishing weather – wasn’t wearing a dry top and got soaked. The good thing – I was able to keep fishing without freezing my butt off!
Moving on to the second and third-hand reports, when the weather has been favorable, the trout fishing has been excellent. Most of the surf reports have been coming from mid-coast, north, but the southeastern beaches are starting to pick up as well. Tons of shorts, but good numbers of nice keepers, with no apparent rhyme or reason as to which you may find where. Select for the larger fish by using bigger baits – mirrolures, grubs with longer tails, etc. Usually, though, its just a matter of sticking it out, sorting through the dinks to get a few nice fish. Could be worse. Note that the trout limit has decreased to 4 fish at 14″ or larger per day. My personal preference would be for a higher creel and a larger minimum size (say 16″), but I can live with this.
In other surf fishing news, still lots of black drum around although most are pan-sized. Again though, you have a reasonable chance of hooking a 2-10 pounder — these are great fighters and perfect eating size. Sadly, the bluefish have really shrunk. Most locations along the coast are reporting only microblues in the surf. Unless the big choppers hit the beach, we are probably going to be stuck with these minis. If you do get into a school, don’t be discouraged too soon – try jigging a heavy metal lure or jig/grub under the school or right after the school passes, bigger, more desirable fish are often feeding on the scraps.
Despite my first-hand experience above, there have been good catches of nice-sized sea mullet, with excellent reports coming out of Wrightsville in particular. But all the beaches are having runs. Some big blowtoads have been mixed in as well. Still a trickle of pompano from the far southeastern beaches but they are just about gone. Spanish have been gone for weeks.
There’s been some nice flounder landed at Hatteras Inlet this week and puppy drum seem to be scattered all over the coast. Some nice gray trout are showing at the Cape Lookout rock jetty and few are being caught here and there in the surf. Last but not least, there have been some reports of respectable striper fishing inshore, with a trickle of big surf fish showing up, mostly around Oregon Inlet northward. The biggest I’ve heard of was a 35 pounder, but most being caught are near or just under legal (28″).
Water temps are holding in the 60s along most of the coast, from about 60-even north to the mid-upper 60s down the beach and along some of the south facing shorelines. This week, we’ve got increasing SW winds (will the big drum show back up?), a cold front Thursday and then a picture perfect weekend forecast.
