Tuesday May 6, 2008:
Guides day out, went fishing with my longtime friend/fishing buddy and fellow guide Capt. Travis Dant of Flat Out Flying. We planned to go check out reports of Spanish at Carolina Beach and catch'em on fly . The winds were from the NE @6 mph, according to the weatherman, wrong, wrong, wrong. ENE @ 10-15mph was more like and the seas were a tad bit swollen. We arrived at our spot, after a mildly dry ride, and saw a spanish bust right in front of the boat as we came off plane. That was the last one we saw. Our first 200 yrd drift took about 45 secs. and every drifted after that was a bit quicker, it was not ideal for fly fishing or another kind for that matter. On one of our upwind resets we decided to throw out the trolling plugs and did manage to pick up a blue and a seabass but those were our only fish in about three hours. It was time to pay for our "easy" ride down the beach as we headed back to the inlet and into the wind and swell. Eight miles later and several mouthfuls of water we arrived at Carolina Beach "CB" buoy and shot the inlet.
Once inside we decided to give the Cape Fear River a shot for some Red Drum or Speckled Trout. We ran through Snows Cut and headed north toward downtown Wilmington. We hit several island and I managed only one small but colorful red drum on a Cotton Cordell small spot. At 14:00 we decided to call it a windy day.
Capt. Danny Wrenn w/ Cape Fear Red Drum
Wednesday May 7, 2008:
What a difference a day makes. Travis and I decided to try it again with the promise of better conditions. We approached Carolina Beach inlet and the ocean looked like a lake compared to yesterday. We made our run down the beach and saw Spanish skying everywhere, but we had a plan. We arrived and there were four other boats around and one off the the NE all by himself. We made several unproductive drifts and noticed that we were now all by ourselves. Everyone else was over to the NE with that lone boat. Turns out that was where the fish were.
sunfish eating jellyfish
I spotted something finning and thought it might be a shark or cobia so we went over to investigate and discovered sunfish eating jelly balls. Then we moved over to the NE and joined the other boats. That's when the spanish erupted everywhere at about 9:30 and the frenzy continued in small pockets for about 3 hours. We were fly fishing and had multiple hook ups but Travis was the only one to land a single spanish. After 2-1/2 hours Travis finally relented on the fly fishing only rule and I land a nice spanish on a gotcha plug on the second cast and the bite was over. We trolled, cast and dredged for another hour and nothing. We decided to move back to the inlet and fish some structure. We jigged and cast and caught some blues and seabass. Finally we anchored and I picked up this nice flounder on a "Gotcha Plug."
Capt. Danny Wrenn w/flounder on a gotcha plug
Rip'em up and let some go,
Capt. Danny Wrenn
96 Charter Company
Wilmington, N.C.
910.619.2224
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