Tidelines – March 2025
While I still have yet to spend a day on the Carolina Princess head boat, located on the Morehead City waterfront, I did manage to get out on the water for a 3/4 day of sea bass fishing with the head boat’s captain, Wayne Dodson.
To complement the head boat’s business (and supplement his own income), Capt. Wayne Dodson bought a 31’ JC, named it the Princess “Too,” and when he’s not captaining the big boat, or when there’s a day that the head boat doesn’t have enough people to make a trip, he now has a boat to take up to six people out for a similar day of bottom fishing.
The Princess “Too” is docked on Atlantic Beach behind Fisherman’s Inn (plenty of free parking for his clients), and on the Friday before the Super Bowl, my two sales guys (Chris and Jackson) and I met him and his mate Kenny LeVane at a comfortable 9:00 am to work our way out the inlet and into the 4-5’ seas that were a little closer together than we had wished.
Gary Hurley, Chris Rogers, and Jackson Spiers, all of Fisherman’s Post, with a limit of black sea bass hooked 11 miles southwest of Atlantic Beach using cut squid. They were fishing with Capt. Wayne Dodson and Mate Kenny LeVane on the charter boat Princess “Too.”
The seas may have been sporty, but the Princess “Too” has plenty of dry seating, so when we arrived at our first stop, some live bottom about 11 miles southwest in 85’ of water, we arrived fresh and relaxed.
Wayne told me he picked this spot to start because of the ride. For early season sea bass fishing, he can go east of the Cape and fish in 55’ of water and in sight of land, and he can go down the beach and fish in 75’ of water, but with the southwest wind, he didn’t want to run side to on 4-5 seas.
As he did a small circle of the area, watching his electronics closely, Wayne told me, “I look at small marks. With sea bass fishing, you’re not looking for anything big, just small little dots on the bottom.”
Kenny prepped for the anchor drop while Wayne found his mark and then moved the boat in position, a much easier task for both on a 31’ JC than on the 95’ head boat. Whether a head boat or a charter boat, though, getting the anchoring just right and the boat positioned exactly where you want is often the difference in achieving bottom fishing success.
“When you’re fishing on a tiny little rock, you have to have your stern just right on that rock. If you’re off your position, you might not catch anything,” Wayne explained while backing down the boat.
Capt. Wayne Dodson (right), who captains the 95′ head boat Carolina Princess and the newly added 31′ Princess “Too,” and Gary Hurley, of Fisherman’s Post, with a couple of the keeper sea bass they landed in 85′ of water.
Wayne continued, “If you’re fishing on a rock, I try to never anchor on the rock. I want to anchor off the rock because the bigger sea bass are off the rock and not right on top. If you stop on top of a rock, what you’re going to catch are ring-tailed porgies and other fish.”
I’m guessing he got our positioning correct because not only did all three of us immediately begin bringing up sea bass, often two at a time, but in the 100+ fish that we quickly hooked, every one was a sea bass—zero bycatch.
Wayne’s formula for sea bass fishing is both time-tested and current. For current, we enjoyed the light but powerful Aerial jigging rods paired with Siegler conventional reels. For time-tested, we used two-hook chicken rigs tied with 4/0 circle hooks and 100 lb. mono, and then baited those hooks with squid.
“My bait of choice for sea bass is definitely fresh squid. Not squid wings but fresh squid because it has a scent to it. It’s just a whole lot better bait,” Wayne told us while Kenny stood in the stern and dehooked fish, measured fish, got the smalls back in the water as soon as possible, and counted the keepers going in the box. “If it has worked for head boats and the Carolina Princess for 50 years or so, it’s got to work for what we do on Princess ‘Too’.”
We were about nine shy of our sea bass limit when the bite finally slowed. Wayne moved us to another area about two miles away, a series of small, little ledges with a coral bottom that had growth and life on it.
The three of us dropped, and just like the first stop, the sea bass bites came quick. We finished out our limit, and Wayne headed to a place another eight miles offshore named the “Grill Rock” where we could hopefully add some grunts to the box.
After his first drop, Wayne knew we weren’t going to find any grunts. He brought up a sea bass, and asked me to feel how cold the sea bass and the sinker was.
“If you’re fishing, even in the middle of summer, and you bring up a fish, the first thing you can do is grab your sinker,” Wayne instructed. “If your sinker’s cold, even if the top of water temperature is 75-degrees, it could be 65-degrees on the bottom. Always check your sinker to see how cold it is. It it’s cold, you may have to move and go deeper to get to warmer water.”
We soaked baits just a little while longer to confirm no grunts, and then the five of us headed back to Beaufort Inlet, this time with the seas at our backs.
While “Grill Rock” hadn’t produced grunts for us, the real value of our third stop was that it gave Wayne a chance to explain that the origin of the name came from dropping the original grill from the Carolina Princess on that rock in honor of “Woo Woo” Harker, the well-known, well-respected, and very popular Morehead captain that mentored Wayne in his early days and often fished the spot now named “Grill Rock.”
In addition to Woo Woo stories, the banter on the boat included such topics as Amish women, the pros and cons of Dramamine, the art of distracting elders by giving them a wad of cash to clean up and count, the nature of captains that believe a little too much in the bad luck of bananas, and a host of other topics with little to no intellectual value.
In other words, the conversations were perfect for a day of bottom fishing.
If you’d like to spend a day of offshore bottom fishing (or a half day trolling the beach in the summertime) with a captain that has 14-years of head boat experience, then call (252) 726-5479 or visit www.carolinaprincess.com where you can find information on both the Princess “Too” and the Carolina Princess head boat.
Reluctantly, I’m going to end by recognizing that Capt. Wayne Dodson, in the limited time he fished, did catch the biggest sea bass, if not the biggest two sea bass. I congratulate him, but I really need to congratulate Capt. Terrell Gould, another icon of the Morehead City waterfront.
Wayne is a bit reluctant, and understandably so, to publicly admit that almost everything he has accomplished as an adult is a direct result of his relationship with Terrell, but everyone in the extended Carolina Princess family already knows, and Terrell’s not the type to even mention it.
