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A few good friends and I took last week off to hunt for Bull Redfish in Pamlico Sound. It's been on everyone's bucket list...the Sound is a massive body of water often blasted by wind so we did have a big boat along for this part of the trip. (so consider this a mixed kayak/boat report) This month marks the beginning of spawning run for reds. We were told they could be caught on cut bait fished on the bottom or with popping corks and soft plastic combos. The area is chocked full of bait of every kind so we had no problem filling the livewell...just about every cast with the cast net boated numerous finger mullet, menhaden and shrimp. Our first few trips out however only yielded heavy action from the CNRs on our cut and live bait. Then we corked till our arms hurt. Finally Nitefly (Eric) found some bull red action on an unlikely bait- live shrimp- unfortunately though on his light rod (2500 reel) and the fish broke off boatside before we got the boga grips on him. Later in the week after tiring of CNRs we switched to live blue crabs as a bait which proved to the best way to get them. The first night I got 2, both in the 40 inch range (we kept forgetting our tape measure so used a rod held against the fish) Eric was next on the morning bite, followed by Dave and Brandon with a monster 45 incher. These fish put up an incredible fight and take some crazy runs which is kind of hectic when you have eight or more lines in the water that have to be pulled up when you hook into one. I'll let the pictures tell the rest.
We primarily hit the sound for bull reds at daybreak or dusk, which left us plenty of time in our kayaks to explore the core sound and adjacent areas during the day. There is a lot of water to explore down there, and our target was mainly puppy drum with the occasional flounder thrown in. We found the key spots (for puppies) were the grass flats adjacent to deeper water or channels on the low tide and areas that had grass, oyster or mudflats that had recently flooded on the rising/high tide. The fish tended to be quite spooky so a slow drift with the wind and sun at your back produced the best results, however these conditions were hard to find on some of the days. It is a beautiful area down there with minimal fishing pressure. We also saw an abundance of rays, skates, sharks and several sea turtles.
We primarily hit the sound for bull reds at daybreak or dusk, which left us plenty of time in our kayaks to explore the core sound and adjacent areas during the day. There is a lot of water to explore down there, and our target was mainly puppy drum with the occasional flounder thrown in. We found the key spots (for puppies) were the grass flats adjacent to deeper water or channels on the low tide and areas that had grass, oyster or mudflats that had recently flooded on the rising/high tide. The fish tended to be quite spooky so a slow drift with the wind and sun at your back produced the best results, however these conditions were hard to find on some of the days. It is a beautiful area down there with minimal fishing pressure. We also saw an abundance of rays, skates, sharks and several sea turtles.
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