May 12-13, 2012
Written by Joy Leisen
In what's become our weekend routine, Josh and I got up at 3:30am Saturday morning and drove down to the SC coast. We headed straight to the beach and got there just before low tide as planned. It was pretty darn windy, but the waves were not large or numerous enough to prevent wading/casting. After getting bait in the water ASAP, we began the waiting game...
It wasn't long until we had a strike. After a short but exciting battle, I pulled in my personal-best atlantic sharpnose shark!
Yay! After releasing him, we recasted again. Soon there was a strong run on one of the rods. It was Josh's turn, and after waiting patiently for a minute or so, he set the hook.
Fish on!
As Josh played the fish very carefully, far out from shore we saw a pissed-off blacktip shark performing a series of jumps. Luckily the rig held... for the first seven or eight leaps. The shark took one last jump and snap! Josh reeled in the line to take a look, and the leader had been bitten clean through (90-lb test). At least we got to keep the sinker...
After just a few minutes Josh got a chance to redeem himself- but alas, this shark jumped and broke off too. The action slowed down and we had some lunch. We were beginning to feel a bit discouraged about actually catching blacktips when one of the rods started going nuts again.
This time victory was his! A nice southern stingray!
After we released the ray, I set out into the surf in search of small fish. The bite on my small piece of shrimp was pretty much constant, and I succeeding in pulling in a new lifer, the southern kingfish (southern whiting)!
When we had our next good run on a surf rod, I rose to the challenge and began a long battle...
I landed a southern stingray too! I love rays- they put up such a good fight, and are so interesting to see up close.
A kind passerby snapped this photo of Josh and I with my ray:
After that, we had no more takes and decided to pack it up just after high tide (3-ish). We headed to Edisto Beach State Park and set up a campsite. We spent the rest of the evening leisurely hiking just over 4 miles on the beautiful trails at the park.
Just after cooking dinner, it began to rain, which surprised us a bit since the weather report had declared a "0% chance of rain." Go figure... anyway, the rain continued throughout the night but we stayed dry in the tent.
Here's me enjoying my morning coffee in the only dry spot at the campsite:
We had breakfast and got back to the beach around 7:45 for Round 2 of fishing.
Things had changed overnight. A cold front had moved in, and we had no action on any large baits. Josh did manage to catch this lone southern kingfish:
Eventually we got sick of the rain/inactivity and left to try some tidal creeks for flounder, redfish, etc. But it was the same story there, too. No bites to speak of, and Josh caught a single young-of-the-year silver perch:
We saw some mullet jumping but couldn't entice any bites (besides blue crabs) so we began the trek home, still feeling pleased overall with our weekend trip.
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