Tidelines – September 2026
Going on a fishing trip is different than going fishing, and a good fishing trip is what I needed in early August to help make peace with saying goodbye to summer and hello to another fall semester of teaching writing at CFCC.
The solution was simple. I needed to head to Swan Quarter, connect with the area, and then wake up early to meet my friend Capt. Grey Davis, of Hyde Guides, for a long half day on the water where the Pamlico Sound meets the Pamlico River, a place of expansive, untouched shorelines and big, open water.
This way, I wouldn’t even need to catch a fish. The fishing trip would be a win by the time I hopped on Grey’s boat and made my first cast.
For the second time now, Grey set me up with overnight accommodations, like he does with many of his clients, in a house on the water at the end of Landing Road. I had stopped on the drive at Washington’s Eastside Bait & Tackle to pick up six fresh mullet, and it only took a couple of minutes after checking in to walk out to the point, cut and hook some mullet chunks, and send each one out and wait for a bite.
The bait stealers were active and kept me changing out baits. I had one big pull down followed by a 30-yard run before breaking the line, and then something else picked up a bait and moved it a few feet before letting go. I didn’t catch a fish in my two-ish hours of fishing, but I didn’t need to catch a fish. The work was the reward, and this was a fishing trip and not just fishing.
I had thought about picking up some local shrimp and steaming them at the house, but then I remembered Grey’s text earlier that day—Wednesday was fried chicken night at Harris Steak & Seafood House on Lake Mattamuskeet.
The place hops during hunting season, but my evening was a quiet one, quiet in that good way, and the drive home was quiet, too. I realized when pulling back into the rental house’s parking area that I had only passed one other car on the 20-minute drive. Swan Quarter was playing a leading role in this fishing trip, as my busy and crowded Wilmington already felt so very far away.
Comfortably sitting on the second floor deck and looking up on an nighttime of stars, I double checked the meeting time text (5:30 am at Great Ditch Road in Engelhard), set my alarm, and even though my afternoon session hadn’t produced a single fish, I called Day One a win.
Grey knows his local waters, so we made a quick run in the dark down a long canal before popping out in a small bay off of the Pamlico Sound. We turned right and pulled off plane in another small bay. He lowered the trolling motor, put a topwater in my hand (and another in his), sent me to the front of the boat, and told me to start covering water.
Life was all around us, with shrimp scattering along some grass lines and small schools of finger mullet ever so slightly disturbing the water’s surface in almost every direction we looked. I found my rod’s walk-the-dog rhythm and had confidence in every cast because the morning felt like fish had to be around. However, after about 25 minutes, neither Grey nor I could boast a follow, let alone a hookup or even a blowup.
Then Grey was the first to hear it.
He asked if I heard it, and I hadn’t. Then it happened again, and there was little doubt in both our minds that the morning was about to become special.
The sound was coming from the other side of a small grass island, so we couldn’t see the commotion at first, but with Grey’s trolling motor moving us forward on the “10” setting, clearing the corner of the island didn’t take long.
We still had a way to travel to get within casting range, but instead of making us anxious, our slow but steady pace forward just gave us more time to take in the jaw-dropping sight of an acre of corralled large mullet being violently and repeatedly thrashed and sent scattered out of the water and through the air in desperate fashion.
The fuel for this chaos was obvious—clearly visible orange flashes, orange backs, orange heads, and orange tails confirmed old red drum and not sharks.
Grey took my topwater rod and handed me a popping cork setup. The size of the cork and smaller soft plastic was more tailored to trout and slot red drum fishing, which is what Grey had expected to do because the big red drum popping cork bite in the area hadn’t materialized yet, but we were pretty sure the size of the soft plastic wasn’t going to matter much just as soon as Grey and I could reach.
Both our first casts didn’t find a fish, but on the retrieve we noticed that most of the feeding frenzy was happening on the far side of the bait, the deeper-water side. We got a little closer, sent our casts to the other edge, and my popping cork disappeared just as soon as it touched down. I was tight to my first old drum of 2026.
I could tell you about the second, third, fourth, and fifth fish we pulled from the slowly moving bait pod, but going five for five without trying to run up numbers isn’t the truth of the trip. In all the visual splendor of watching countless 40+” red drum attack a helpless and frantic school of mullet, my favorite moment wasn’t a hookup.
The emotion that stayed with me more than any other came from the sight of a big red drum that looked like a submarine when it ascended from underneath and within the school of bait and headed straight for us. With this fish now almost halfway above the surface, the pushing water cascaded left, right, and directly over its clearly visible head, as did the mullet, and then the big red descended, again like a submarine, creating a hole as it disappeared.
That memory is the truth of the trip.
I may not have needed a fish to make the trip a success, but I’m glad that Capt. Grey Davis, of Hyde Guides, included a fish (or two or three or four or five). You can check him out at www.hydeguides.com or reach him at (252) 671-0577 and talk either fishing or fishing trips.
I hope you catch that fish that broke me off in front of the Landing Road house, and I also hope you feel the sense of distance and peace that Swan Quarter and that part of the coast instils. And then let Grey do his thing—work hard to include fish in your fishing trip.
