Ocean Isle & Sunset Beach Fishing report

July Wrap - Up!

Posted on 07/29/2018

With only a couple more days left in the month, July 2018 is almost in the history books.  I would like to say thank you to all of my clients for making it a very busy month.  This past week, like the week before, we had rainy, stormy weather to contend with almost every day.  While I was fortunate to get the majority of my trips in, it was certainly a challenge.  The unsettled weather is continuing to have an affect on the fishing, keeping the water dirty in some areas and not allowing us to fish others due to it being too rough.  But, just like last week, I still can't complain too much about the quality of the fishing that we have had, based on the conditions and time of year.

I know I'm probably beginning to sound like a broken record, but we are still picking away at all of our target species at the moment.  The flounder fishing remains fairly consistent when we can find clean water in the right areas, and although we have had to pick through quite a few undersize fish, we have been able to find a few nice keepers as well.  We have also been finding a few redfish and black drum, in a variety of different areas.  Our reds this past week ranged from underslot pups up to a couple of nice overslot fish pushing 30 inches.  Finally, late summer is typically when our speckled trout fishing begins to slow down considerably, but the rain seems to be keeping our water temps down, and thus allowing us to continue to have a little trout action.  The trout have been mixed in size as well, with quite a few undersize specimens, but we're still finding a few good ones in the 2-3 pound range mixed in.  So all in all, fishing hasn't been too bad, and hopefully we'll continue to have this kind of mixed bag action, because as I type this, it looks like we're headed into week 3 of the same weather pattern.

I realize that the summer season is unfortunatley going to begin to wind down soon, but that simply means that we're going to be one step closer to the great fishing that fall brings, so its never to early to start thinking about a fall fishing trip to Ocean Isle or Sunset Beaches.  In the short term however, I still have plenty of open dates in August, especially from mid-month on, so be sure to give me a call in you're going to be in town and want to do some inshore fishing.  Check out a few of our catches from this past week below!

-Capt. Kyle