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.

Autumn’s shorter days and dropping temperatures signal the massing of striped bass along the Mid-Atlantic coast to fatten up for the long winter ahead. Larger mature bass are leaving New England waters, where they spent the summer months, to migrate to winter grounds off Virginia and North Carolina and they feed relentlessly as they go. Smaller fish tend to winter in the vicinity of the nursery areas where they were born with major concentrations located in the ocean waters adjacent to the Hudson River, Delaware Bay and in and around the Chesapeake Bay. These smaller fish will be on a mission to pack on the pounds too and present great light tackle opportunities for anglers.

The fall migration is aided and abetted by concentrations of forge fish moving out of coastal estuaries forming massive schools along the beaches where they provide a traveling smorgasbord for the hungry stripers. The combination of the need to bulk up and the availability of forage drive the bass to eat a lot and often both day and night. A variety of techniques will catch them, but one that has really come into its own in recent years is matching the prevailing baitfish with soft plastic imitations. Soft baits for saltwater were once nothing more than oversized twister tails that were threaded onto a jig head or under the hair skirt of a bucktail, but tackle shops have literally been flooded with an ever growing variety of the soft stuff in shapes and sizes that match almost any of the forage species the bass will encounter during the fall months. Anglers have found that many of them can really catch fish!

The variety of baitfish you may encounter during fall madness can include silversides, sand eels, two species of anchovies, several species of herring, mackerel, mullet and menhaden in sizes ranging from young-of-the-year peanuts to full grown bunker that can tip the scales at more than a pound. Carrying a supply of soft plastics and tackle capable of fishing each effectively can be the key to catching bass regardless of what you encounter on any given day.

To fish plastics effectively you’ll need a selection of tackle capable of handling the various sizes and weights of the lures. Since most of the new genereation of soft lures are weighted internally the larger ones require heavier tackle to cast or troll. Most can be handled on light to medium spinning or plugging tackle and using braided line will help get them down in the water column when the bass are holding deep. Remember just because birds wheeling and baitfish are being pushed to the surface does not necessarily mean the bass are feeding on top. For example, if you encounter a school of menhaden casting one of these plastic imitators into the school and retrieving it across the surface will probably get little attention from the bass below. Let it sink and begin a slow to medium retrieve and it’s sure to get the attention you’re looking for.

Soft plastics can be fished in a variety of ways. Most of them work well simply casting and retrieving without trying to impart any action other than the built in tail motion. In deeper water when marking stripers close to the bottom on your depth finder you can drop and retrieve or jig them slowly. The largest versions, like the 9 inch menhaden imitation pictures, can be cast on heavier tackle, jigged or trolled behind the boat.

Regardless how you fish plastics for stripers remember that speed is a critical factor. Bass show a strong preference for slow to moderately paced targets. Anglers often have to make a conscious effort to retrieve these lures slowly and it is even more critical with today’s high speed reels. Cranking the lures too fast will result in lots of bluefish bites—and these toothy critters cause havoc on expensive soft plastic lures—but not a lot of interest from stripers.

Autumn is a time of bounty for farmers and striped bass fishermen alike. It has the potential to provide some of the best fishing of the year and one of the best ways to catch a bunch is with soft plastic lures. Don’t leave the dock without them.

By Dan Kibler

Winter isn’t entirely an off-season for fishermen in the Cape Fear area. Some hearty souls will venture out to nearshore wrecks and reefs in search of black sea bass, and others will try and seine the deeper holes in tidal creeks with a slow-moving, soft-plastic bait for the few speckled trout that are stirring.

But even if you aren’t in a boat, you should still have your rod in hand – getting it ready for spring, when the weather and action heats up. Or, you can make it a point to get tips on how better to handle that rod when the Spanish mackerel and flounder return in the spring.

Capt. Rick Bennett of Wrightsville Beach, Capt. Jimmy Price of Southport and Capt. Robert Taylor of Calabash all have ulterior motives for their downtime.

Bennett, who operates Rodman Charters out of Wrightsville Beach, uses the winter months when he’s not fishing for tackle and boat repair. Price says it’s a great time to pick up some fishing knowledge and tips at seminars and fishing/boat shows, and Taylor said it’s time to get your boat back in tip-top shape.

“Fishermen should first be cleaning their reels,” Bennett said. “Don’t let them sit until you’re ready to take them out again in the spring. They’ll deteriorate. Clean your reels well, put oil or grease on them as needed, and spool on new line.”

Going through your rods one by one and checking the guides and reel seats is another chore that can be done fairly quickly. Use a Q-tip to check each guide for any cuts or nicks that could fray your line, possibly causing you to lose the fish of a lifetime the next time you’re out.

Second, Bennett makes sure his tackle box is ready for the spring. He’s said in the past that he will tie as many as a thousand flounder rigs during the offseason, and he also spends his time making his custom-built Rodman rods.

Price does the same work on his tackle that Bennett does. He said fishermen should also keep an eye out for fishing schools, seminars and boating/fishing shows that pop up during January and February.

“There will be a lot of fishing schools to attend, and there are a lot of good speakers out there giving seminars,” he said. “You might want to keep your eyes out for websites and newspapers and magazines to see when the shows are. I think it’s something that somebody who doesn’t have a lot of fishing experience can do. They can go and listen to the seminars and really learn some things in just a short amount of time.”

Taylor, who operates an offshore charter boat, spends a lot of his winter days working on the boat, sanding or painting the hull, doing mechanical work, and getting his Coast Guard inspection. There’s never a better time to do boat maintenance, he said, than the winter months.

Bennett said that preventive maintenance, in the form of winterizing, should be mandatory for all boat owners.

“If you winterize your boat, you don’t have to worry about it until you’re ready to use it again,” he said. “I pulled mine out of the water last year on Dec. 1, winterized it, and put it back in the water on March 15. When I hit the key, it fired right up.

“That end-of-year service is so important.”

Winterizing can be performed as a service at a marine dealer, or you can winterize your own boat, depending on how comfortable you are with tools and expensive parts.

Standard winterization includes running a fogging solution through your boat’s engine while it is running to protect internal parts; spraying a protective, anti-corrosive film on external engine parts; draining the engine block and manifolds and filling the engine with anti-freeze; draining the lower unit of gear oil and refilling with fresh oil; greasing all external fittings; disconnecting the battery and storing it somewhere warm; removing spark plugs and spraying oil on the cylinders; changing engine oil and filter; removing the prop and greasing the prop shaft, and adding fuel stabilizer to prevent condensation in the gas tank; winterize the fresh water system; and remove the outdrive and grease the U-joint.