Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 15, 1990 TAG: 9004160228
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
That's not exactly the kind of Easter-holiday menu that visiting surf anglers along the Outer Banks of North Carolina had hoped to find.
"Nothing really going on," was the broadcast from the Beach 95 FM Fishing Line early Friday. "Let's hope for the best. The Easter Weekend is here."
The missing ingredient was bluefish, those big-headed, hollow-bellied 8- to 12-pounders that migrate northward in the early spring, making this chain of low, sandy islands and miles of rolling surf a magical place for fishermen.
Easter Weekend is a big number on the Outer Banks' angling roulette wheel. So is Thanksgiving. Not only are they times when fishermen can get away for a few extra days, but they have a way of synchronizing with the seasonal movements of fish.
So anglers funneled in all week, from Jersey, from Delaware, from New York. By the hundreds. From Tidewater Virginia. Inland North Carolina. Western Virginia.
They often came in beach vehicles with wide, whining tires and rods mounted on the front bumper.
They came to wait. Lines out, they stared at the sky, stared at the waves, stared at each other, stared off into space.
The sea beneath their booted feet moved endlessly, but it was void of fish. About the only excitement was when a bottom rig would hang in the shifting sand and an angler's rod would bow when he tried to reel in. That could bring applause.
Some, didn't bother to get out of their vehicle. They watched through windshields smudged with salt spray.
"There is virtually nothing. I mean it is sad," Damond Tatem said early Friday. He operates a tackle shop at the foot of Jockey Ridge in Nags Head. "There has been nothing, because it has been too cold."
Then things appeared to begin to change about noon Friday.
Charter boat skipper Buddy Cannaday had eased the Captain BC out of Oregon Inlet and headed her southwest toward Cape Point when he came into an acre or two of blues. After his party caught 40, he radioed Tatem.
The expectations of surf anglers began to rise like a flood tide.
"They are headed hard to the southwest," Tatem told the endless string of people inquiring about the blues at his sand-blasted shop. "They have come 3 miles in the last hour-and-a-half. I don't think they are too far off the beach down there. The guys are getting awful loud on their radios."
Tatem had to go to Norfolk on business. "If they don't make it today and it gets warm tomorrow, they are going to make it," he said as he headed out the door.
Down the beach an hour's drive, at Buxton, Ollie Jarvis was hoping for a wind change to bring schools of broad-shoulder channel bass to Cape Point, which is just out the road and over the sand from his Dillion's Corner tackle shop.
"The last time the wind was southwest, we caught 14 drum, which was Tuesday night," he said. Since then, the blow was out of the north and northwest. "It is supposed to go back southwest tonight. So there is a chance we may get some big fish in."
The peak channel bass (red drum) action had occured early, when the March full moon and the water temperatures rose in unison. Scores of fish were caught, some mashing the scales past the 50-pound mark."
"They were tearing the water up almost like a bluefish blitz," Jarvis had reported.
Most of the time, though, fishermen were having to satisfy themselves with catching bait-size mullet and blowfish.
By the time Tatem had returned from Norfolk late Friday, some blues had hit the surf at the north side of Oregon Inlet. "I don't think there was a million of them, but there were a lot more than it had been, because there had been nothing," he said.
The wind didn't turn southwest for Jarvis Friday night. It didn't shift Saturday, either. Adding to the damage, the air temperature dropped about 10 degrees during the day.
The charters out of Oregon Inlet found even more blues Saturday than the day before. A school south of Oregon Inlet measured 6 miles square.
"The boats have loaded up already," Tatem said at noon. "We have the same situation as yesterday, only more fish. I think what they did yesterday was they flared out and some came to the beach. They are just milling around."
A few blues were as far north as Virginia, where Claude Bain, chairman of the Virginia Salt Water Fishing Tournament, put a chum line out off Sandbridge while fishing with Bob McKinney of Sugar Grove and Joel Arrington of Manteo, N.C. They hooked six, landing three that weighed 8 to 12 pounds, Bain said.
Back along the Outer Banks Saturday afternoon, the vigil continued, with fishermen waiting and watching, silhouetted against the sky. The surf rolled at their feet and the blue Atlantic stretched endlessly across the horizon. Somewhere out there were bluefish.
by CNB