For Military Appreciation Day, Southport. Long read, but worth it.
Loaded up the truck and pulled out of Charleston on Friday with marshwabbit riding shotgun, headed for Southport Marina. Gene, myself, and a team of more board members organize and put on the MAD Charleston event, and with all the coordination and site stuff to do for our event, our only real chance to take some troops out as captains is to head for another chapter’s event.
I haven’t run out of Southport in a handful of years and Gene doesn’t know those waters either. Between that and waiting on our 2 Marines coming in on the bus from Camp Legeune, we waited for a little bit of daylight to push off the dock. Good thing we did too, we had a narrow miss at 25 knots of about a 4 foot log floating in the channel just after we came out of the ICW into the river channel. Whew, pucker factor first thing in the AM.
We ran the cut on the Ft. Caswell side of the Cape Fear River mouth and headed beachfront down towards the first pier and put our lines in. All the locals were talking about kings and spanish all close in to the beach. Saw kings skying and bait balls all over my bottom machine. We didn’t want to spend a bunch of time netting bait so we just trolled cigar minnows and a diving plug. Zigzagged in and out from 15-30 feet of water from there down to the second pier. Then turned and trolled out and around AR-430. Nothing doing, so we picked up and ran out to the 15 mile rock area. Daggum pile of boats out there, some MAD, some regular folks, some Rumble in the Jungle. We trolled around them and turned towards another number I had that was out away from the masses a little bit. Finally some life, hooked up a trophy remora on a cigar minnow and then had a bonita hit the diving plug. Skunk is off, even if it was just a remora. Gene tried real hard, but we couldn’t convince either Marine to stick to their butt cheek for a quality picture. Big schools of bonita were busting on the surface so we casted some gotcha plugs at them for a little
