Outer Banks Fishing

Outer Banks fishing is absolutely amazing. True,
America has more than 3,500 miles of coastline. That’s
a lot of oceanfront; a lot of water to fish. Lot’s of
great fishing opportunities. But few compare to North
Carolina’s Outer banks. Whether your preference is fishing
the high surf, bouncing bait off a pier, or tossing a
plug from a boat, OBX, as it’s fondly known, is the
best place to do it.

Outer Banks fishing. The thing of legend. Yet readily available to any angler.

Although perhaps less so now then in the past, it remains a truism: If you reach out your hand the sea will feed you. And nowhere is this more true than in North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

That’s one of the reasons Friend Wife and I make at least one trip a year to the shore. There are fishing and gathering opportunities there that you don’t find anywhere else. And, if you want, it’s no big deal to fill your freezer with an annual supply of fish after just a few days of Outer Banks fishing any time of the year.

There’s more involved, of course. There’s something rejuvenating about the ocean, something that makes you new. As a friend here in town puts it, she has to return to the sea, now and again, to recover her life balance.

Look at a map and you’ll notice that Kentucky---which was formed by two different oceans---doesn’t have one. Perhaps a good thing. If it did there would be no reason to go to heaven.

I’ve fished the coasts all my life, from Maine to Florida, California to the Canadian border, and much of the Gulf as well. Of all the possibilities, I like North Carolina’s Outer Banks fishing best. Depending on the time of year, and whether you fish the ocean side or the sound side, no other place offers the diversity of Outer Banks fishing.

The OBX, as it’s called, is a series of barrier islands and shoals stretching about 70 miles or so just off the coast. Two great ocean currents---The Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream---meet here. The result: Plenty of food, plenty of cover, and a perfect environment for marine species. Thus, everything from migratory offshore dwellers to reef fishes can be found here, along with enough shellfish and crustaceans to satisfy anyone’s appetite.

All in all, October is probably the best time for Outer Banks fishing. But June runs it a close second. While everything is affected by tides and weather, during June you’re likely to find bluefish, spots, croaker, Spanish mackerel, King mackerel, cobia, triggerfish, and spadefish hitting on the ocean side; while the sound offers speckled and gray trout (i.e., weakfish), flounders, and, of course, blue claw crabs. Offshore there’s a mixed bag, with dolphin (the fish, not flipper) predominating.

The fact is, however, that whenever you choose to visit OBX offers superlative fishing of one kind or another. Even in the dead of winter. In December and January, for instance, the big schools of false albacore, which started migrating from New England in September, have arrived. Imagine one small tuna after another, averaging eight pounds or so, hitting with abandon on light tackle or even a flyrod.

One December, while making a duck-hunting tour of the OBX, I got into the most incredible bluefish blitz I’d ever seen. You can’t hunt on Sundays on most of the East Coast. So we spent that day surf fishing. Once continuous wolf pack after another chased baitfish onto the beach. The first fish hit about a quarter to noon. When we left at seven pip emma they were still hitting strong. Fish to an honest 20 pounds, and I never saw fewer than a dozen rods bent at one time.

They told me that two weeks before there’d been a similar run of puppy drum; fish running to 52 pounds, nonstop, in the surf! Sorry I missed that one.

This year we chose June for our visit. I’m not a beach person, as such. But Friend Wife is. Give her a beach, a blanket, an umbrella and a book, and she’s content. Me, I see sand as a hindrance, and agree with Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, who pondered, “if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, do you suppose that they would get it clear?” But I digress.

For a combination trip, to do some fishing, and crabbing, and sightseeing, and sitting on the beach, you’d be hard pressed to beat June. So that became this year’s choice.

Gameplan was to do a little pier fishing, a lot of surf fishing, and, maybe, some crabbing. In the event, it didn’t work out quite that way.

First off, this was Friend Wife’s first serious try at crabbing. She’d done it casually, on other trips. But not loaded for bear, as it were. We were running six crab pots, and virtually every time we checked them they’d have blues working the bait.

Most of them were small, it’s true (crabs have to measure five inches, across the points, to be legal). But there were enough keepers that we ate crab every day.

Crabbing is better on the sound side then on the ocean side. And, while there were a few trout being caught, the numbers weren’t there, yet. So it became a choice of crabbing or fishing, and we opted for the crabs most of the time. Two weeks or so afterwards the trout were in strong, and you could catch a limit while the crab traps did their thing. Just imagine a fresh-caught sea trout stuffed with crabs you’ve trapped yourself. That’s whkat Outer Banks fishing can be like.

In the evenings we’d fish the surf, right outside our door. Surf conditions weren’t the best, however, and it was more exercise than anything else.

The one day we hit the fishing pier the Spanish mackerel were in. And we did OK on them, as did everyone else that day, casting Gotcha plugs. We kept two for dinner.

Oddly enough, there were no bluefish taken that day. But the next day, according to reports I checked, both blues and Spanish were hitting, along with several King mackerel (the largest went more than 30 pounds) and a legal sized cobia.

Like I said, you never know what’s going to hit when Outer Banks fishing.

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