By: Steve Fifer
More wind. If it ever dies down for a day or two, there’s some good fishing around the area. Inshore, the local marshes like the Haystacks and the Newport River have a good population of redfish in them right now. Look for them at high tide right up against the grass banks and around oyster rocks. They’ll smack a topwater lure early in the morning but a popping cork-and-plastic shrimp combo is the best way to catch them. Live bait is great, too and there’s lots of shrimp and finger mullet in the creeks. To keep from constantly getting snagged on oysters, try using just a very small jighead – about 1/16th to 1/8th ounce instead of the traditional carolina rig. That little jighead and live bait works great beneath a popping cork too. The water quality on the outgoing tide has been awful lately but it is improving and the outgoing tide has been good for flounder. Here’s where the carolina rig works best with a mud minnow or finger mullet fished down tide from feeder creeks, dock pilings, or anywhere you find a dropoff. Speckled trout are active on a moving tide, either incoming or outgoing with incoming preferred, along the ICW. Soft plastics or Gulp on a jighead is a good
choice as well as the popping cork/shrimp combo. Nearshore, the Cape Lookout shoals are the place to go for some crazy action with nice-sized (2-3 pound) bluefish, big (18-24″) spanish mackerel, and false albacore. They are feeding heavily on glass minnows the exact size as a Sea Striker Jigfish or Casting Jig or a Don’s Glass Minnow jig. Just look for the birds diving on bait or troll those lures just using your regular spinning rod in 4 to 12′ of water adjacent to the white water until you find them. It won’t take long. There are always fish on the local AR’s; flounder, gray trout, sea bass, bluefish, and sharks. Try jigging a 1-2 ounce Stingsilver or bouncing a 2 ounce bucktail the a 4″ Gulp shrimp along the bottom. Drifting is more effective than anchoring over these reefs. In the same area you’ll find king mackerel if you slow troll a live menhaden or cigar minnow. These kings aren’t the whopper 25 pound-plus, they’re in the 10-15 pound class, but they’re plentiful.”
