Spring brings anticipation for lots of things.
Flowers, greener yards, fresh veggies, warmer weather, shorts, flip flops and – unfortunately – crazy weather.
For the region’s angling community, the season brings anxiousness for new species to migrate into our water.
One of the tops on the list is red drum – channel bass to some of the older crowd – the fish with one or more big dark spots near the tail.
Juvenile reds, known around here as a puppy drum, have been providing action all winter long in many inlets and rivers.
But when the big boys start showing around Ocracoke, just south of Cape Hatteras, rod and reelers get excited.
Well, reds have already started to pile up in our coastal waters and have shown themselves in coastal waters and portions of the Chesapeake Bay.
Like the spring season, sometimes fishing can be crazy.
When it’s good, reds are being taken from the beach, from piers and from boats inshore sight-casting for the large schools making their way from the south.
As a mid-Atlantic redfish enthusiast, don’t listen to the chatter that another place is the top area.
While Gulf Coast anglers battle to hold onto their claim of being the red drum capital of the country, more big fish topping 50 inches in length have been caught from our waters.
In fact, before slot and bag limits were instituted to help keep the population high, the International Game Fish Association all-tackle world record was landed in northeastern North Carolina waters.
Since then, unknown numbers of fish close to that 94-pound, 2-ounce giant caught in Avon 1984 by David Neuel have been hooked, measured and released.
By the way, Neuel also holds the association’s 50-pound line class world record that was caught the same year and that IGFA list-topping fish also is the North Carolina state record.
Virginia- and North Carolina-caught redfish also hold most of the IGFA’s length-release, line class and junior world records.
Our big-reds action typically runs from late March through mid fall, and the puppy drum season is just about all year.
Virginia anglers can keep a limit of three fish per person a day, with each having to measure between 18 and 26 inches.
In North Carolina, the limit is a single fish that measures between 18 and 27 inches per day.
While slot limit red drum are fabulous to eat, the big-fish IGFA records likely will stay put through history – since rules throughout coastal waters prohibit the taking of the really big ones.
That’s okay, catching them and watching them swim away are one of those things anglers really look forward to.
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