We fished for red drum at Fisherman’s Island again yesterday evening. I was in Charles Southall’s Albemarle. The photo of his boat was from a couple of weeks ago when I was fishing in Tricia’s boat. You can see the bait we were using. Wes Blow was in his boat to one side of us. The yellow Regulator is Capt. Rick Wineman. There was plenty of room between Wes and us and I suggested that to Rick after I saw his boat reach vertical a couple of times. They seemed perfectly content over there (the nuts). Then they started catching drum. They called over with 3 hooked up and we started thinking about joining them in the breakers. Luckily, we then hooked up ourselves. We lost that one but it made it easy to stay where we were. We fished until it started to rain and then headed in. The drum were running large. We caught 6 and only one was under 50 inches long. Rick ended up catching 5 reds and Wes 2. We all lost a number of fish. One of our anglers was very new to this (Charles’ daughter’s boyfriend). You never know how that is going to work out but the kid must be doing OK because Charles was nice to him after he knocked the conventional reel into free spool, while fighting his first drum, resulting in a hopeless backlash. He even held his cool when his second drum resulted in Charles’ brand-new Bishop’s custom rod/reel jigging set up going overboard. The boyfriend felt so bad that he wanted to jump over and try and get it (in the dark, where the sharks live). I thought Charles might let him but I guess that he does not want his daughter mad at him so he kept the kid in the boat. When we were clearing the rods to go home, I felt something heaving as I was cranking in the last rod. Up came the hook snagged on the multi-colored braided line of Charles’ rig. It was the best catch of the night as we got his rod back. We had another interesting event when Jody Linthicum , in Rick’s boat, hooked into something big. He thinks bigger than a drum. It ran towards us and he thought broke off. When he was cranking in, his line got snagged on something. They thought that they had our anchor line. At the same time, Hunter Southall was trying to land a big drum. We could see the fish, but Hunter could not get it to the boat. Turns out, Hunter and Jody were playing tug-of-war. Jody finally let Hunter win. Jody got his rig back with a broken hook. His line just freed itself as we were netting the fish so we never saw exactly how they were hooked together. Hunter had the fish hooked in the mouth.
