Tournament Report: Inshore Trail Championship
The Inshore Trail Championship is a one-day competition that comes at the conclusion of the five Inshore Challenge events that Fisherman’s Post hosts every year. The five Inshore Challenge events are all standalone events (Ocean Isle, Topsail, Wrightsville, Southport, and Carolina Beach) open to everyone, with Trail boats competing in the individual events as well as what might be best explained as a season-long TWT.
Boats entered in the Inshore Trail cull their heaviest three-red drum aggregate over the five events, winning money along the way at each of the five events, and boats finishing in the top ten at the conclusion of the season qualify for the invite-only, complimentary Trail Championship.
The Trail Championship is always the Sunday after the Carolina Beach Inshore Challenge (that fishes on Saturday), with weigh-in at Inlet Watch Marina from 3:00-4:00 pm. This year, the team that finished the regular season as the top boat also finished atop of the field in the Championship event.
Team Kook Tacos, comprised of Tim Disano, Tripp Hooks, Jimmy Dever, and John Cooke, put together three-fish over the five events weighing a total of 21.27 lbs. to win the regular season, and then they weighed in two fish totaling 14.18 lbs. to win the Championship.
They started the Trail Championship just as they had started the day before for the Carolina Beach Inshore Challenge. They caught bait easily, went to the same spot they fished on Saturday, and had the same results on Sunday that they had on Saturday—they didn’t catch anything.
The team left this first spot, a section of 30-40 yards of deeper water leading to a wall of oysters, and headed a little further south to a spot where they had heard some fish had been recently caught, but the second spot didn’t produce any fish either. With not a single bite by 10:30, Kook Tacos headed back to the same spot where they started the day, and this time they started picking through some smaller fish (5 lbs. or less) before finally hooking what would be their second heaviest red drum of the day at 6.9 lbs.
With the tide falling, they were running out of water, so Kook Tacos had to move away from their spot with the 6.9 and a 5.0 lb. fish in the livewell. On the way to the scales, they stopped at a spot closer to Shallotte and put out a quick spread of baits, as they had been fishing mullet on the bottom all day long.
They didn’t get any bites, so they started the engine and began cleaning up the boat for the run, and then after reeling in two of the four lines, one of the two remaining lines started screaming drag. As quickly as they could, they got the fish beside the boat, gave it a quick measure, and took off for Inlet Watch.
“We had made peace with the fact that we were going to weigh in a 6.9 and a 5.0 lb. fish,” explained Disano. “That last one was definitely a Cinderella fish.”
Second place in the Trail Championship went to Wayne Newkirk and Dave Langley, of Team Lunar Low. They finished the day with a two-red drum aggregate of 14.06 lbs.
Newkirk and Langley started their day fishing one of their usual spots, a place with high water and where oysters and grass come together, and by 7:45 they had a 13 lb. aggregate in the livewell. They spent the rest of the day trying to better their 13 lbs., and they did so once at 9:30 and then again at around 2:00.
They lost the first place finish by just over a tenth of a pound, and Newkirk couldn’t help but wonder why one of his fish weighed exactly the same as it weighed on his scale on the boat, but the second fish weighed 2/10 of a pound less. Then later at home, he noticed that the livewell where the second fish had been stored was full of rock crabs, seemingly explaining the difference, a difference that could have meant the win.
The 2023 Inshore Trail will start in late May with the Ocean Isle Inshore Challenge. More information, including rules, schedules, and entry forms, can be found at www.FishermansPost.com.
Also available online are the complete results from the Championship, as well as the final results of the regular season, including the running standings of the Trail after each of the five events.
