Well, it took me a few days to get the pictures off my camera from the Emerald Isle half of our North Carolina beach trip.

Wednesday was slow fishing with a stiff breeze coming out of the south.  The wind and waves did make for aquarium-like water conditions, but no Spanish mackerel moved in to chase what few baitfish could be seen.  A quintet of “sea mullet”, actually a variety of kingfish that gets perpetually misnamed, made it to the fish cleaning station.

Thursday was our best day of fishing.  Same crystal clear water conditions, but the bottom fish were more active around high tide at 11:00 a.m.  We beached around 20 fish in 2 hours.  Kingfish, spots, pinfish…  But just before high tide, I had a 20 minute stretch of fishing that made the whole week worthwhile.  Tap, tap, tap…17″ flounder.  Hmmm…throw fish in cooler, throw right back to same sand bar.  Tap, tap, tap…15.5″ flounder.  This is no coincidence at this point, so I tied on a flounder rig tipped with a green and white shad dart.  I filleted a small spot that I had been saving for bait and lobbed the entire apparatus into the surfline.  First cast…16.75″ flounder.

Still kicking myself for not taking some pictures of the catch down by the surf while they were still fresh.

At this point, I’m thinking that I could wiggle my big toe in the surf and pull out a flounder.  But as soon as I thought I had the rest of my limit of keeper flounder in casting range, they vanished.  I threw my flounder rig for another 45 minutes without so much as a nibble.

I guess it was just one of those “fluke” things, pun intended.

Regardless, we had a nice cooler of surf fish to clean that night.

Friday, back to slow surf fishing.  I caught about 10 sea mullet, or whatever you want to call them, throughout the day but nothing else was biting.

That evening our fishing culminated in an awesome fish fry though.  We had 2 skillets of hot oil sizzling as we dumped batch after batch of fish fillets coated with egg and fish batter.

Oh, can’t forget to throw in this picture.  A fishing trip to Emerald Isle wouldn’t be complete with the occasional sand shark making a mess of your 2-way bottom fishing rig.