The fishing has been good…
…or, so I’ve heard. I’ve read some sweet fishing reports recently. We’ve been fortunate to have had some really nice weather the past few weeks and the bait is thick along the shoreline. There has been excellent fishing for drum of all sizes and bluefish (small to medium 2-5 pounders with a few large), along with some great bites of nice sized Spanish mackerel at times. Remarkably, with the water temps still up over 70 all along North Carolina’s beaches, the Spanish are still hitting north of Oregon Inlet along with pompano, another tasty and hard-fighting summertime species. The variety of fish available to surf and shore anglers during the early fall in North Carolina simply can’t be beat and the action can be frantic with large schools of finger mullet cruising south along the shoreline being chased by a variety of predators.
Anyway, I am sick of reading about the great fishing – we’ll find out for ourselves next weekend during our more-or-less annual (sometimes biennial, sometimes semiannual, sometimes annual) Cape Lookout camping and fishing trip. This will be the eleventh anniversary of our first fall trip and probably trip number 13 or so (lucky thirteen?) in total.
After all this time, our first trip easily remains the best in terms of fishing. We had perfect timing; I arrived myself Thursday afternoon at the tail end of a NE blow – it was still overcast and breezy. After the rest of our wonderful crew filtered in, the following three days were picture perfect mid-October weather – dry, sunny, with almost tropical water conditions. Great swimming and great fishing too, with lots of hungry bluefish, a mixed bag of bottom fish, and enough puppy drum to keep things interesting. A resplendent Sunday dawn arrived with a school of false albacore breaking water just behind the bar I was casting for trout and puppy drum. I managed one cast, one hookup, and one broken line before they moved down the beach and then disappeared altogether as the sun rose in earnest. What a morning! What a weekend!
The promise of that kind of fishing – along with the promise of good friends and good beer – keeps us coming back to Lookout. Who knows what next weekend will bring – we’ve got a cold front set to hit early in the trip and anything could happen on either side of that. And we’ll have plenty of beer.
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