Just getting around to this report. This was my family’s 10th year vacationing on Seabrook and, finally, my son and I are getting the hang of fishing this island. This year we fished almost every day, spending most of our time fishing the surf for bonnetheads at Privateer Point and fishing Cap’n Sams Creek for reds. We used a Penn Battle 6000 and a Penn Fierce 5000 - both with 30 lb braid, mainly with 50 lb mono leaders. As usual, blue crabs for bait were effective and plentiful. As you can see from the pics, we did pretty well!
The bonnethead action at Privateer Point is crazy. We’d hike down there at sunrise and there they were in every direction, just swimming around in about a foot of water looking for crabs. So my son would scoop up blue crabs in his net, we’d break them in half for bait, cast them out and reel in the sharks. Pretty wild. It got to the point where we were seeing so many that we could sight-cast to them and then we’d watch the sharks take the bait and swim off. After that worked, we would just dangle the crab on a hook about five feet in front of our toes in the surf and just wait for a shark to come along and take the bait. Our next step was to attempt a hand feeding, but we chickened out after my wife threatened to kill me if a shark bit my son’s hand. Maybe next year…
As for Cap’n Sam’s, there are a couple of benches by the creek along Marsh Gate Drive where you can easily cast a line into the creek along the oyster beds. When we floated chunks of blue crab about 4 or 5 feet below the surface (under a bobber), we caught some pretty nice reds. When the blue crabs ran out, we switched to fresh shrimp but those attracted mainly smaller fish. Both times we hit this part of the creek at sunrise, we watched dolphins strand feeding along the far bank - very cool!
One thing that didn’t work out for us was trying to catch a bigger shark. We caught a pretty big cownose ray (probably 20+ lbs) and cut off his wings to use as shark bait. Over the following week, we alterna