North Carolina Hosts Three Months of the World's Best-Ever Big-Fish Action by Raiford Trask "Man, look at that," someone said quietly I'm not sure who it was, it might have even been me. We had thrown four menhaden overboard and two 500-pound class bluefin were feeding furiously, blasting holes in the ocean's surface like exploding depth charges. I nervously pulled more line off of the rod tip to keep our bait drifting with the chum. It didn't take long. The line snapped out of my fingertips and the click on the big 9/0 reel began to scream as angler Bruce Chappell applied the drag. We went straight back between John Bayliss' Tarheel and Peter Wright's Raptor, with all three boats maneuvering hard to keep their fish away from someone else's wheels. There was even more action just off of our bow, as Howard Basnight's Wave Runner and a large center console had also hooked up. They're Back To get bit 10 seconds after you start chunking used to be big news in giant bluefin fishing, but that was before North Carolina's winter fishery was "discovered." That was also before well known Pelican skipper Arch Bracher released 23 in one day this winter on 130-pound tackle, and before Wright and Charles Perry released 73 giants in one day (it's true) with Stewart Campbell angling the fish on even heavier gear. That was before natural-bait pioneer Charlie Hayden came out of retirement just to see the mayhem. Of course, if you read the article "Carolina Bluefin Surprise" in last year's June/July issue, that kind of fishing should not be too much of a shock. What you will remember from last year's article is that the fishery was new and you could catch just about all the bluefin you wanted, only you couldn't keep the big fish -- a fact which I thought would discourage participation. But as the furor and the number of charters this year proves, I was quite wrong -- as usual. "I don't know how to describe it. It's too incredible," said Perry, who wired over 400 giants in the cockpits of Wright's Raptor and Paul Spencer's Sizzler this winter. "I don't think the fishing world has ever seen anything like this, anytime, anywhere." Considering Perry spent three months in Madeira for last summer's incredible giant blue marlin fishing, his statement carries more weight than the average Joe's. Howard Basnight, a Morehead City charter captain and one of the first to fish the bite last year, concurs. "There has never been anything like it," Basnight says. "Nobody that has ever fished has ever seen anything like this. It is truly something to behold." Who, Where and When Basnight and Perry's sentiments are similar to anyone who saw the hordes of aggressive, lit up bluefin in their chum. That is a pretty eclectic list of people, from Swansboro king mackerel fishermen who had never seen a bluefin to offshore veterans like Hayden, Gary Stuve, Don Tyson, Skip Walton, Marsha Bierman, Cal Sheets, et al. As North Carolina's coast in the winter can be a bit hairy when the wind blows, most of the visiting anglers chartered from the fleets of custom charter boats available along the coast. Considering the decidedly un-tropical weather of the Outer Banks in January, this is probably not a bad idea. These boats are the 50-foot-class Carolina-style rigs and are staffed by crews used to the inlets and often crummy conditions. Whether you charter or take your own vessel, you'll find the fish on a smattering of different wrecks offshore of the southern Outer Banks, with the most successful spots being the Protieus, the Tarpon and the British Splendour wrecks. These wrecks are in 120 to 150 feet of water and are a 27-mile run out of Hatteras. If Morehead City/Atlantic Beach is your home base, you'll have to run 37 miles from the Eastern Slough Buoy. Last year's fishing turned red hot shortly after New Years and stayed that way up until Easter. This year's season has mirrored that of last year, but may wind down a bit sooner due to warmer weather. In any case, reliable estimates put the total number of giant bluefin releases for the fleet at around 3,000 fish -- not a bad total considering the small area, short season and the often unfishable climate. Simple Tactics While last year's fishing was focused on trolling ballyhoo or live-baiting bluefish, the overwhelming majority of this season's fishing was done by chumming. It is different from the chunking done in the Northeast canyons in the following important ways: whole baits are used, and it usually only takes four or five chum baits to get the beasts feeding behind your boat. Menhaden, known as fatbacks on the Outer Banks and as shad in Morehead City, are the most popular choice for chum and can be purchased cheaply in either location. The strategy is pretty simple. You wait your turn to get over the wreck, and when you mark fish on the scope, you throw out a few fatbacks. When the bluefin appear, feed enough chum in the water to keep them around but not enough to get them into a disorganized feeding frenzy. If you do it right, the tuna line up behind your boat and you pitch your rigged bait to the fish you want to catch. It is almost essential to have three people in the cockpit: the chummer, the pitcher/wireman and the poor sod in the chair. The angler should be harnessed and ready to go before the wireman throws the bait. The angler keeps around 8 pounds of drag on the reel, light enough to allow the wireman to pull line off of the rod tip but stout enough for a hook-set. Most bites occur with the swivel barely away from the tip and the angler immediately goes to strike drag -- somewhere around 40 pounds if you're using 130-pound line. This prevents the fish from being gut hooked while allowing the captain to quickly follow the initial run. When the run is stopped, the angler puts the lever up to 55 or 60 pounds. Boats using 150- or 200-pound line are regularly employing well over 70 pounds of drag. The great thing about fishing in only 120 feet of water is that good anglers and skilled boat drivers can take these fish quickly. Fishing with 125-pound line, we averaged around 20 minutes per fish in the 500-pound class, and released a 850-pound fish in under 40 minutes. That's not bad, but heavier gear is even quicker. I watched Raptor, using 200-pound Dacron and Wright's driving ability, catch four to our one. The Legal and Science Departments If you have paid attention to the controversy regarding the decline of Atlantic bluefin stocks, you have some idea that we're dealing with a highly regulated fishery. With this in mind, I called the National Marine Fisheries Service to check on the required papers and found out legally fishing for North Carolina's winter bluefin is not overly complex. You must have an NMFS permit to fish for any bluefin anywhere in the Atlantic (call 508-281-9370). You must not sell any of your bluefin. If your bluefin is 73 inches or more, you must release it. If the fish is between 59 inches and less than 73 inches, you may keep one per day, per boat. Easy enough. If you are wondering why anglers can kill and sell bluefin in the Northeast during the summer, it is because the commercial rod-and-reel season doesn't open until June 1, and by this time the North Carolina bluefin are long gone. When the limit of 531 metric tons is reached, which happens before the Carolina fishery gets going again, the commercial rod-and-reel fishery closes. Finding such a phenomenal fishery in the heavily fished waters of the Outer Banks leads to some obvious questions: Where did these fish come from, and where do they go when they leave? No one really knows yet, but you can rule out water temperature changing migration habits. "The water temperature has not changed dramatically enough in the last three years to produce this kind of activity," says temperature guru Mitch Roffer, who operates Roffer's Ocean Fishing Forecasting Service in Miami, Florida. "What it may be is one of the few cases where a management plan is actually working and this is a group of fish that has rebounded." Of course, Roffer added, the key to learning more about this fishery is tagging fish. NMFS scientist Eric Prince agrees, despite the fact that his agency has been criticized as slow to respond to this unique opportunity to conduct bluefin tagging experiments on a grand scale. "We were caught with our pants down to a certain extent," Prince says, "but we did tag more bluefin in those three months than we have in the last five years. I think that is quite an accomplishment." As far as the migration habits of this particular fish stock go, Prince has two ideas. "It is certainly speculation at this point," he says, "but it's entirely within the realm of possibility that these fish join the spawning bluefin in the Gulf [of Mexico] and spawn in May and June. Knowing what we know about giant bluefin, these fish could go from Hatteras to the Gulf in two days. It is also possible that these fish spawn somewhere we don't know about, say off of the shelf of North Carolina, and have a different migratory pattern. We will know more when we start getting our tag returns back." Most of the locals think the fish have always been there -- which brings us to another question: Are there other unknown areas off the East Coast that could produce equally good bluefin catches? The answer may be yes, but so far no other spot has compared to the numbers found on the Tarpon. Large bluefin have been found sporadically on wrecks directly off of Atlantic Beach and have been seen as far south as the WR2 off of Wrightsville Beach. It is possible there's another stock of fish stacked up somewhere, waiting to be found. But even if there isn't, the Tarpon Wreck and its surrounding waters could be the best honey hole the fishing world has ever seen.
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