Team Ocean Isle Fishing Center Smashes Records at SKA® Championships
The Southern Kingfish Association is the most successful tournament fishing trail in saltwater. It has been for almost two decades with about 60 sanctioned events each year from North Carolina to Texas. Only top tier competitors qualify to fish the SKA® Yamaha Professional Kingfish Series and Team Ocean Isle Fishing Center, comprised of North Carolinians Rube, Brant and Barrett McMullan, have been competing at the pro level for over ten years from a progression of Yamaha-powered boats including the 32’ Yellowfin® they campaigned in 2009.
After a year of competition in the SKA’s® 12 regional divisions and the special pro tournaments the highest placing teams are invited to fish the SKA® National Championships, which were held recently in Biloxi, Mississippi. The Northeastern Gulf of Mexico is home to concentrations of king mackerel that is unprecedented, which makes the competition that much more difficult. Just winning the championship is a feat unto itself, but this year the McMullan’s accomplished the equivalent of winning the World Series, the Super Bowl and the Stanley Cup all rolled into one—they caught the largest kingfish ever weighed in 19 years of SKA® tournament competition. That includes over 1,000 tournaments each with hundreds of boats competing for a total of hundreds of thousands of fishing hours all aimed at catching the biggest kingfish possible! But not only did they catch the biggest kingfish, they posted the heaviest two fish combined weight in tournament history to literally leave the other 223 teams entered in the event in the dust. They also beat the prior Mississippi state record king mackerel by ten pounds!
It all took place on the first day of the tournament in an area of oil platforms called the Horseshoe about 85 miles southeast of Biloxi. “The bite was unbelievable,” said Brant McMullan. “The twin F350’s got us to our spot fast, one of the first boats there. The first bait in the water got eaten immediately and so did every bait we tossed in after it! We were fighting fish constantly while kings were jumping out of the water all around us.”
But the McMullan’s weren’t alone and as the morning progressed more competitors kept arriving in the wide area between the rigs. By mid morning there were probably a hundred boats, all hooked up most of the time. Light tackle guide and kingfish pro tour competitor and captain of the Yamaha-powered 33 Contender® Snake Dancer, George Mitchell, said, “It was the most incredible bite I’ve ever experienced!”
“We were catching a lot of fish,” Barrett noted, “and we had one about 44 pounds in the fish bag, but we needed a much bigger fish if we were going to make it on the leader board. This is the SKA® Nationals in Biloxi and last year there were over a dozen fish in the 50 pound class brought to the scales so we made a very difficult decision, to leave the bite to find a bigger fish!”
“We cranked up and left the area, but didn’t get far when we saw birds diving on bait,” Brant continued the story. “We ran over to check it out and found a school of menhaden balled up on the surface being attacked by predators from below. The pogies were circling so fast it looked like a whirlpool when Barrett threw the castnet to catch some for bait.”
Menhaden are small baitfish compared with the larger blue runners they had been using earlier, about the size of the palm of your hand, but as they would find out they were big enough to attract the attention of a monster kingfish lurking below the mêlée. Barrett’s pogy got slammed by a fish that almost stripped all the line off his reel on the first run. “It fought so deep and hard that we never saw it until the very end of the fight when it popped up alongside the boat and Brant gaffed it,” Barrett concluded. “The fish fought so hard it must have had a heart attack, which was probably a good thing because if we had seen it during the fight we probably would have been the ones to have the heart attack.”
The fish was caught late in the afternoon and the run back to Biloxi and to the scales was going to be close, but the F350’s pushed the big Yellowfin® center console to full speed and never missed a beat, getting to the weigh-in with minutes to spare. “We were never worried about our engines getting us back,” said Brant. “We’ve fished Yamaha outboards exclusively on our personal, charter and tournament boats for years and they are the best on the water. We currently own 6 F350’s, 6 F250’s, 2 F225’s and 2 F150’s and that’s the best endorsement you can give.”
The fish hit the scale at 74.10 pounds, which combined with their second fish gave them a two fish aggregate weight of 118.13 pounds, both new records for SKA® competition. “When you look at the tiny bait the big fish inhaled I guess the old adage is true,” said Brant. “Elephants do eat peanuts!”
The McMullan’s are a humble bunch who run the Ocean Isle Fishing Center (www.oifc.com) in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina consisting of a beautiful store, docks, restaurant and five Yamaha-powered charter boats capable of offering fishing adventures for everything from backwater trout and redfish to Gulf Stream fishing for marlin and tuna. The facility hosts five fishing tournaments including two SKA® events each year.