Tournament Report: Pleasure Island Fall Surf Fishing Challenge
A welcome change from recent years greeted the 485 anglers that registered to fish in the 2022 Pleasure Island Fall Surf Fishing Challenge, as the weather all weekend long featured comfortable temperatures, lots of sunshine, and slight wind.
The tournament was hosted over the weekend of October 14-16. Anglers registered at Tournament HQ, under a big tent in a public parking lot beside Sea Witch Cafe in Carolina Beach, and then they headed out to the entire Pleasure Island beachfront to select their fishing grounds for the 36-hours of tournament fishing. Fishing started at 11:59 pm on Friday and lasted until 12:00 noon on Sunday, when everyone met again at Tournament HQ for a complimentary Awards Dinner preceding an Awards Ceremony and raffle giveaways from both Island Tackle & Hardware and Fisherman’s Post.
The leaderboard featured five species (bluefish, trout, black drum, pompano, and sea mullet), as well as a Red Drum TWT and Junior, Lady, and Senior angler payouts.
Rick Klemann, of Apex, NC, took the title in the Bluefish Division with a 2.2 lb. blue caught Saturday evening. He was fishing an area straight out from the condo he rented, located about halfway between Sea Witch Cafe and the North End.
Rick Klemann, of Apex, NC, weighed in the heaviest bluefish in the 2022 Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge. The 2.2 lb. bluefish hit a piece of cut bait and brought Klemann nearly $2000 in prize money.
Klemann’s blue hit cut bait, and it was one of many in a school, as everyone fishing around him also hooked a bluefish at the same time. The blitz lasted about 15 minutes and then stopped, with Klemann’s fish being the biggest brought in.
The Black Drum Division went to Elbert Fussell, from Wilmington. He landed a 2.2 lb. black drum on Saturday afternoon. The winning black drum hit a piece of fresh shrimp on a two-hook rig. The tide was close to dead low, and Fussell noted that all of his fish came within two hours before dead low, during dead low, or two hours after dead low—he caught no fish all weekend long during any other part of the tide.
For the Trout Division, both speckled and gray trout count, and this year it was a speck that took the top spot. A 2.9 lb. speck was weighed in by Buddy Hucks, from Whiteville. He was fishing an area located just between Kure Beach and Fort Fisher, and he cast his live mullet minnow beyond the breakers and around the rock piles. The winning trout hit around 3:00 am on Saturday, and it was Hucks’ only trout all weekend.
Buddy Hucks, from Whiteville, won the Trout Division in the 2022 Pleasure Island Surf Fishing Challenge with a 2.9 lb. speckled trout caught on a live mullet minnow near the line separating Kure Beach from Fort Fisher.
Gary Wall, of Wilmington, weighed in the event’s heaviest sea mullet at 1.5 lbs. The fish came on Saturday around noon with an almost full high tide. He was using shrimp on a two-hook rig and was targeting a hole in a break in the bar about 30-35 yards out.
His 1.5 lb. sea mullet was one of 10 sea mullet he caught, but most were much smaller (in the 8-9” range).
Randy Deese, from Mount Gilead, NC, won the highly contested Pompano Division with a 0.6 lb. pompano. He was one of four anglers that weighed in a 0.6 lb. pompano, but Deese was the first to weigh, making it to the scales at 11:10 am on Saturday.
The biggest payout of the weekend is always the Red Drum TWT winner, and this year the $4000+ check went to Chris Oldham, of Lexington, NC. Oldham was fishing the North End on an incoming tide and soaking a piece of cut mullet on a fish finder rig when the 6.8 lb. red drum hit on Saturday evening.
Oldham was targeting a “pretty good slough” and had his bait about 30 yards off the shoreline. His upper-slot red drum was his only red drum of the weekend.
Second place in the Red Drum TWT went to Jeff Palmer, and when presented with his winning check, Palmer handed the check back and asked for his winnings to be donated to St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
Palmer, who has a healthy two-year-old girl, said he had been seeing St. Jude’s commercials on TV for a couple of weeks and decided prior to tournament weekend that any money he won would go to help families with children that weren’t as fortunate as him.
His 6.6 lb. red drum was hooked on Saturday morning at the South End during the first hour of the rise. The fish hit a live mullet minnow on a Carolina rig.
All of the fish weighed in the tournament are picked up by NCDMF, who performs study analyses on the fish before taking them to First Fruit Ministries, a local food bank that can accept whole fish. First Fruit Ministries began in 1998 and has grown to serve over 20,000 hot meals, provide emergency groceries to over 5,000 households, and shelter over 24 homeless women and families annually.
Next year’s Pleasure Island Fall Surf Fishing Challenge will be hosted October 20-22, and for a complete leaderboard, as well as more information on this year’s event and all of Fisherman’s Post’s surf fishing events, go to FishermansPost.com.
