Flame Surf

When is a hole not a depression? When it’s found by scouting the OBX surf and reveals a redfish hot spot.

By Craig Holt

October 24, 2006

To do well at most endeavors takes preparation. Of course, good luck doesn’t hurt. But as legendary Major League baseball-owner Branch Rickey once said, “Luck is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration.”

Translation: hard work gets results.

For successful surf anglers that means searching for productive water, plus being there at the right time. Although there may be equipment issues (clothing, lures, tackle, transportation) for specialized angling, the sport can be as simple as a cane pole and a can of red wigglers.

But the key to angling success — whether at the banks of a farm pond or the Atlantic Ocean shoreline — remains the presence of fish. People might have the right stuff, but if a body is water lacks fish, time can be wasted.

But what if gamefish are plentiful, anglers’ equipment and baits/lures are well chosen, but catching remains difficult? Welcome to the world of surf fishing for red drum at the Outer Banks during October.

OBX anglers this month have opportunities to catch lots of red drum, from “puppy” sizes (juvenile fish) to “old” drum (50- to 60-pounders). The fish are there; the surf often is filled with reds that follow baitfish flushed out of inlets such as Hatteras, Drum, Ocracoke and Oregon. During rare calm-water days, surf anglers often see clouds of flame-tinted water behind the breakers that indicate big redfish schools.

Yet, as in everything else, some people will catch more fish than others. Truth be told, some anglers catch a lot more redfish than others.

What’s the secret to red drum fishing success? As your high-school football coach might have said, success has three elements — inspiration, preparation and perspiration.

Getting ready to land Mr. Bronze Shoulders certainly requires using the right length-and-strength surf rods and reels, sturdy monofilament lines, strong leaders, sharp hooks, heavy pyramid sinkers and fresh baits. But first the fish have to be found, which means other work besides owning a good Hatteras Heaver rod, Penn, Shimano or Abu-Garcia equipment.

To be a successful red drum surf angler requires working on intangibles before the first sinker is hurled at the churning ocean.

Brothers Greg and David Griffin of Cary understand the intangibles. They drive from Cary to Avon each fall to compete during Frank&Fran’s Tackle Shop Red Drum Tournament, certainly the East Coast’s largest and perhaps most competitive surf-fishing event.

Late last October they won a couple of the tournament’s divisions, including the award for most drum caught. In addition, Greg Griffin’s 47 1/2-inch long trophy red (almost certainly weighing at least 50 pounds although not official because it’s an all-release event) won the largest-drum-of-Day-2 prize (it was 1 1/4 inches shy of matching the winning fish’s length).

But the most impressive part of the Griffins’ effort was how their preparation paid off.

They didn’t wait to show up the day before the tournament; they drove the 250 miles on Sunday, four days before the first chunks of tournament-rigged mullet hit the water at 12:01 a.m., Oct. 27. Normally, they’d have made the long trip Tuesday or Wednesday, a day or two before Folb’s judges dropped the green flag at midnight Thursday. But the Griffins knew a storm would be hitting the OBX beaches Tuesday and Wednesday.

“It was going to mess things up (scouting the beaches),” Greg Griffin said. “We caught the forecast, so we came down (before the nor’easter hit).”

Wind-driven rain also pelted the beaches Thursday night and most of Friday, which proved their early arrival was the right decision.

But why, one might might ask, would an angler need to scout the Hatteras beaches when the water seems to teem with reds all the time? Well, drum in the surf don’t hang out just anywhere; they like depressions or “sloughs,” places a little deeper than surrounding areas. Sloughs are relatively calm beneath the surface, even during late fall days that feature rolling, crashing waves.

And it takes practice to spot them.

The Griffins wanted to chart some of these “holes,” as they’re known to anglers. During a nor’easter, though, holes usually are invisible, especially at night or if the tide is rising or high.

“We knew another (major) low tide wouldn’t occur (the week of the tournament),” Greg Griffin said. “It’s extremely important to find (holes) during the daytime.”

The brothers also have charted their successes and failures during the years, another key to their fishing success.

During 2000, Griffin and his brother caught the second-largest drum of the tournament two of three days. Two years later David Griffin won a daily prize for the biggest drum.

“Those years the beach (low-tide areas) looked exactly like they did this (2005) year,” Greg Griffin said.

Their tactic is fairly simple: during daylight low tides, they drive the beaches and look at the “outer (sand) bars,” Griffin said.

“The first thing you do is try to find a break in the outer bar,” he said. “Sometimes they might be as small as 10-feet wide. Then you look for a slough.”

Anglers should think of a slough as an area of relatively calm water that’s not roiled by breakers. They’re pretty easy to spot because waves break at the highest spots, the sand bars, as they near the beach. Sections of deeper water, however, are the sloughs. Basically, a slough is a pocket of deeper water surrounded by sand bars.

“You can spot ’em sometimes because (the surface) seems to shimmer,” Greg Griffin said.

The number and sizes of sloughs depend upon the weather. Some years OBX beaches have more and deeper sloughs because of the bottom-carving effects of storm-driven ocean waves.

“When we see a slough when we’re scouting, that’s when we get really excited,” he said.

The Griffins also believe that kind of water offers greater visibility for drum and doesn’t scatter the scent of baitfish — which makes them easier for the redfish to find.

“This year (2005) the deeper the holes, the more it looked like that (shimmery) at high tide,” Griffin said.

For anyone who has driven at an Outer Banks beach (the National Park Service allows vehicles access to Cape Hatteras National Seashore shorelines through designated “ramps” or sand roads), discriminating between patches of shoreline wouldn’t seem to be that difficult. Just pick a landmark and fish in front of it, if that’s your hot spot.

But try doing it at night when the biggest drum are caught. Riding and shining headlights to re-discover a honey hole also can be a little dicey; in fact, it always should be done during daylight. Drum anglers believe automobile lights spook fish, and a careless angler/driver is likely to get a verbal dressing down or even worse, may find his headlights have been disabled because of an “accident.”

“I like the format (of the Frank&Fran’s tournament),” Griffin said. “I love to fish at night. It’s tough, but we love it.”

The Griffins solve the problem of returning to good spots at night by using modern technology.

“We like to find three good holes for this tournament,” Greg Griffin said. “We use a GPS unit to mark them.”

A GPS unit is a hand-held electronic device that hunters sometimes use, along with offshore captains, to aid them in navigation and in finding already-marked hot spots — or, in the Griffins’ case, their favorite fishing holes.

If one hole isn’t producing drum hookups at night, the Griffins check their GPS coordinates and drive to another hot spot, using a route far enough away from beach so their lights don’t shine on the water, scaring fish and upsetting fellow anglers.

Griffin said another key is the strength of the running tide.

“I like it when it takes an 8- to 10-ounce sinker to hold a bait (on the bottom),” he said. “When that happens, I get really excited.”

The brothers use shark outfits, with 40-pound Berkley Big-Game line, 11-foot-long heavy-action rods and Daiwa 50 SLH reels. Using a traditional “slider” drum rig with only 6 inches of 100-pound leader and with attachments crimped instead of using swivels, they like 8-0 Gamakatsu circle hooks and cut mullet chunks. (The short 6-inch leader keeps drum from swallowing hooks, yet allows enough time for anglers to detect strikes and set the hook).

“We catch our own baits in the (Pamlico) sound, behind the house we rent,” Greg Griffin said.

After landing a couple of bluefish, one a 26-incher, the day before last year’s tournament at a spot near Ramp 34, they caught only an 18- and 26-inch red drum there until noon Friday. So the Griffins moved to a second hole near Ramp 30 and spent the rest of the tournament there.

At 11:20 p.m., Friday night, Griffin caught his 47 1/2-incher, an estimated 50-pound drum. Remaining near Ramp 30, they landed 23 more redfish and weighed in nine to easily capture the “most-drum-caught” award. No one else came close to landing that many reds as the 280 tournament anglers totaled 114 fish.

Griffin said he didn’t really know why the biggest red drum hit baits at night, except for the presence of what he called “calico crabs.”

“When the sun went down, we felt the predominance of calico crabs,” he said. “I like to use a lot of (mullet) fillets, and we were losing a lot of baits, but not to bluefish. That told me it was calico crabs.

“The two redfish we caught before the tournament had calico crabs in their stomachs, so I’m sure they were prevalent (at his Ramp 30 hot spot).”

To reemphasize the importance of night fishing for big reds, the tournament winner, Barry Robbins of Millsboro, Del., caught his No. 1 drum (48 3/4-inches long) Oct. 27 at 1:03 a.m. Rob Lennon of York, S.C., caught a drum that tied Griffin’s but 24 hours later, at 2:08 a.m., so Griffin’s catch, by rule, was deemed to be the second-place fish.

“From 4 p.m. Friday until 3 p.m. Saturday, we had a terrific time,” Griffin said. “I felt a little guilty at first, like ‘I’m not this good.’ But people all around us were catching fish too.”

So the lesson of the Griffins is clear — scout the surf zone for “holes” to avoid falling into a depression when it comes to finding late-fall red drum.

source:  http://www.northcarolinasportsman.com/details.php?id=256