Visit From the Deep

Several years ago, the story retold here actually happened. As is normal for me, I have recalled the basics of the event, and I hope I have captured the passion of the moment in time. Tomorrow, I head back to the beach again with my two brothers and father.

Visit from the Deep

Notre Dame football cackled on a distant AM radio station, fading in and out with the rhythm of the crashing waves as the orange full moon rose over the warm, wispy ocean sky. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, it gets dark earlier than on the mainland during winter. Backing our truck up to the surf and hanging a Coleman lantern out to illuminate the bait board, my brothers and I prepared for a night assault on the mightiest sea creature under the stars, Red Drum.

The Red Drum is the master of the deep. Long-lived, these fish sometimes grow to become huge specimens, weighing fifty to sixty pounds or more. During the waning days of autumn and into the fresh cold of winter, these warriors patrol the coast of North Carolina in search of tasty delights. It takes a lot of food to feed a mighty creature. Luckily for the drum, there’s plenty to choose from in this most wild part of the Earth.

Fishy beauty is something for which red drum have never been accused of possessing. Frankly, they are blocky, plain, and ugly fish. Misshapen, thick scales seem to shed constantly from its body. It’s jaw is permanently set in some kind of stupored pose with its wide-placed eyes staring dully straight ahead from either side of its chunky face. Red drum aren’t red at all, they’re more like a dull mud brown with a hint of dull mustard. The one attractive feature is a faded reddish spot centered on its powerful tailfin. A mature red drum reminds me of a slob living in a trashy rusted car.

My brothers, father, and I talked of and planned our night assault all that Saturday afternoon. We returned from our afternoon battle with obnoxious “fish” like skate and more skate to resupply with ice, beverages, and bait. Then as darkness began to win the battle of the late afternoon, we said good evening to our father and drove my brother’s silver Ford F-250 out to our isolated honey hole along Rt. 12 about six miles north of Avon, North Carolina.

As we pulled onto the beach, we noticed one lone window-steamed parked car in the sand a few hundred yards north of the ramp along the beach. We had no interest in passing by this hot car; luckily, we planned to head south anyway, looking for the honey hole we had located earlier in the day and marked by “stroking the dogstar”- my brother’s Garmin GPS.

The hole was easy to spot. It was a classic, easy to spot in the young moonlight. Moonbeams shimmered along the ocean’s surface highlighting the glassy calm of the hole between the storm of breakers beyond and the tamer breaks up close to shore. Red Drum love holes. That’s their restaurant. That’s where we would carefully place our bait.

Under the intense orange moonlight, we set up our normal spread. Traditionally, my two brothers and I line up along the beach in age order. My oldest brother, Joe, stands on the north side of our camp facing the ocean. My middle brother, Greg stakes out the middle of the formation, while I take the south flank. Over the years, we’ve arrived at this predictable arrangement mainly because of my unpredictability with the surf casting rod. Joe is a very powerful line caster. He can send his line far out straight and beyond the wild breakers past the hole. Greg is a solid line caster. His throws always run straight and true hitting the hole every time. My casts, on the other hand tend to be somewhat more powerful than Greg’s, but very unpredictable. I tend to slice my casts every now and then, spraying my line hard starboard. By placing me on the south side of our base camp, I can be as unpredictable as I want without disturbing anyone else’s line.

We tend to toss out about two surf casting rigs per person. Usually at least one or two rigs are drum rigs, that is they are set up with a very large hook and a generous hunk of cut bait. We usually use squid, shrimp or mullet for the smaller blue fish rigs and mullet slabs for the drum.

That beautiful evening, as the Notre Dame game became joined with the wheeling brilliant stars in the intoxicated sky, Joe waded out into the easy surf and let his drum rig fly far and straight beyond the hole and way beyond the far breakers. I could see the bait sparkle in the moonlight and disappear in the sea mist. I often stop to watch Joe cast. It’s always a dynamic, powerful event. Meanwhile Greg and I got all of our lines out, no casts as dramatic as Joe’s. One of my casts predictably went askew.

Things were quiet for a while. Greg and I watched the surf, our poles, and Joe out in the water tending his pole when suddenly we noticed Joe become frantic. His rod tip was suddenly dancing, bending hard to join the ocean. It seemed all Joe could do to keep the whole rod and reel from being stripped from his hands and taken to the deep. We could hear his reel being stripped of line with a telltale whirring sound. Then Joe looked back at us and began barking orders…”CLEAR THE LINES…IT’S A BIG ONE AND IT’S RUNNING!!”

We had all trained for this moment over many years like school children in a fire drill. We leaped into action. With about seven lines out, we had to act fast. If that beast on Joe’s line made a run to the south, we’d be in one very tangled mess. Winding madly, Greg and I managed to get all the lines in just in time as Joe’s visitor dragged the line, pole and him over where our lines had just been. Joe, fighting hard with the pole, managed to back out to the shore and found a way to keep all of the line from stripping off of his reel. Luckily, he had set up his rig with a steel shock leader to provide more protection of his line in case of a big strike. This one certainly could be classified as just that or more.

Already breathless, Joe instructed us to be ready for the landing. Basically, he would try to maneuver the mystery beast (most likely a large red drum) close to shore. Then we were instructed to pounce on the fish when it got close enough and wrestle it to shore. Imagining this Steve Irwin-esque maneuver, we stood ready for our moment, poised for the pounce.

The monster had other ideas, however. Without warning, it began stripping line and running north along the beach away from our camp and towards the steamy car. Greg and I sprinted ahead to make sure there were no obstacles that would impact Joe’s fight. The last thing we wanted was to have Joe trip over driftwood or other debris. Joe sprinted right behind us to keep up with this champion track star fish.

After a few moments withstanding the latest attack and sprinting behind, Joe became very worried. He began shouting that he was running out of line and getting tired. His line was way out, and he was down to the last few feet before the whole line simply detached itself from the stout reel. He would have to take aggressive action in order to save this catch, so he waded back, and took the fight to the fish.

Amazed, Greg and I stood there and watched Joe fight and fight that mystery creature in the emptiness of the glowing night. Time seemed to stop, perhaps an hour passed or maybe it was only a couple of minutes. It didn’t matter. Our truck’s lantern was a distant dot of light far to our south. The steamy car had abruptly pulled away, leaving us completely alone in this beautiful alien world. Slowly, Joe made some progress, and the fish began to give way to my most persistent brother.

The moment of truth was coming closer and closer. I was determined to be the alligator wrestler, and Joe told me to get ready to land him. As he got closer and closer as I crouched in the surf, ready and poised. The fish was still fighting Joe, however. He had other ideas about living on land. With a desperate final attack, the fish again ripped the line in a powerful move toward the sea. Joe, weakened from the battle, could barely hold the pole and that fish began stripping the line and Joe’s hard work away. Then, in an instant, the battle was over as the pole stopped bending to the sea and returned to pointing at the moon. The hookless line began billowing in the gentle breeze-the almost captured opponent free to live another day.

Joe reeled in the orphaned line and when he got to the end of it, he pulled it down to inspect what was left. He studied that line there in the surf for minutes and minutes. Quiet and thoughtful in the weak crashing shore breakers, he stood there silhouetted in the moonlight. Eventually, he came back to shore and the three of us began a slow quiet walk back to our distant Coleman lantern.

Soon though, our somber moods lifted and we began laughing about the whole episode. We relived each second of that adventure over and over. Greg and I prodded Joe to tell us what it felt like to be hooked up with such a powerful fish. He shared every felling, every maneuver, every tense tug. Then he dropped a bomb on us. “That wasn’t a drum fellas…” He paused and let us drink in that revelation. “It had to be a huge barracuda or a sizable shark or something... But definitely not a drum.” We were flabbergasted by his theory. Both Greg and I had assumed that he had hooked in to the mightiest of Red Drum, but Joe was convinced otherwise. Without waiting to be asked how he knew, Joe shared with us that the line hadn’t snapped. Instead, it had been sawed through, right through the thick steel leader. No drum could do that. Only a creature with razor sharp teeth could possibly have severed that leader.

All I could think about after that was what would have happened if I had blindly pounced on that fish. If it was a barracuda or a shark, I would have been in very deep trouble. But I suppose the moon was looking out for me, and that never had to happen.

We finished our walk back to the truck. None of us had any real desire to seriously fish anymore that evening. We’d all had enough entertainment for the night and captured a story for a lifetime.

There are many beautiful things and glorious moments that pass through a person in life. Wonders, from family and friends to nature, are all a part of a most fantastic world. On that misty moonlit evening on a lonely beach where it joins the wild ocean, I experienced a moment of ecstasy and oneness with the cosmos that will forever remain etched in my soul.

Red Drum.