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Steve Thomas proudly displays his catch, a monster red drum.
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Thomas is the only guide allowed to lead fly-fishing expeditions in the salt marshes of the Hobcaw Barony Nature Preserve.
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It may not be a big one, but Paul Sasser is pleased with his catch.
Fishing guide Steve Thomas is leaning hard to his right, bending at the waist and canting his nine-and-a-half-foot fly rod in a brave attempt to throw the big fish—a hefty red drum—off balance and thus rob it of some measure of its vast reservoir of stamina.
It’s a smart technique, one that the distinguished, silver-haired fly-fishing doyen has used scores of times in other battles with this formidable game fish. But the red, at least for now, isn’t ready to give up. The fish calls on some secret cache of energy and makes a run for the tall spartina grass maybe 75 yards off, and Thomas watches his line steadily strip away from its reel until the bright orange backing appears and begins to play out.
Thomas is starting to wonder if he’s going to be able to actually land this fish or lose him to a broken line or maybe a hard-won escape in the shallow waters of the tidal flats. “Hey, guys, I’m starting to get a little tired here,” Thomas says, only half-joking, to his two fishing companions—James Yates and Paul Sasser—who have, for the moment, more or less abandoned interest in their own fishing to watch Thomas battle it out with the big red.
The men are knee-deep in a tidal marshland near Saw Mill Creek just north of Winyah Bay, on the sprawling 17,500-acre Hobcaw Barony nature preserve near Georgetown. It is here, on the one-time playground of Wall Street investor Bernard Baruch, that Thomas guides scores of fishermen in pursuit of red drum, the state’s most popular
game fish.
It’s now maybe 10 minutes into the fight and the red’s sprint for freedom has failed—a victim of aquatic battle fatigue. Thomas gathers line back onto his reel, the fly rod bent with the weight of the fish. Moments later, he has the red out of the water and discovers to his great satisfaction that it’s a 10-pounder just about 3 feet long.
“This,” says Thomas, with a look of supreme exhilaration and complete happiness on his face, “is absolutely the biggest red I’ve ever caught on a fly.”
In general, fly fishing in South Carolina is practiced in the northwest corner of the state, where anglers cast for rainbow, brook and brown trout in cold mountain rivers and lakes. But word is slowly getting around about the red treasure that awaits anglers in the saltwater flats along the coast.
Red drum are powerful, coppercolored animals with deep chests and strong tails that often display one or more black spots. They can weigh in at close to 100 pounds and live as long as 50 years—and they put up one heck of a fight when hooked.
Anglers love catching these fish, also known as reds, redfish, spottails and channel bass, for the thrill of the fight. But the fish is also pretty good to eat—so delicious, in fact, that blackened redfish, popularized in the mid-1980s by New Orleans Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme, led to a classic case of overfishing. Red drum populations, especially in the Gulf region, plummeted and by the close of the decade, Louisiana was compelled to ban commercial fishing of the fish and to impose catch limits on recreational anglers.
“Back then, people on this coast were really nervous that after they put regulations in place in the Gulf that those fishermen were going to come over to our coast and start fishing down our stocks,” says Mike Dennison, a marine scientist with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.
In 1987, South Carolina awarded red drum the protective status of game fish and implemented a daily catch limit of 20 fish. Four years later, the daily catch limit was reduced to five fish per day. In 2007, after red drum populations had failed to sufficiently recover, the federal government stepped in and President George W. Bush signed an executive order banning the sale of red drum caught in federal waters. The order also directed local, state and federal governments to collaborate on programs that would restore healthy populations of the fish.
Today, in South Carolina, recreational anglers are limited to three fish per day—length must be between 15 and 23 inches—but many, if not most, sport fishermen release their catch in the collective spirit of conservation.
Red drum are most often caught by anglers parked at the end of a fishing pier, casting into the surf or trolling from a boat. But taking a red on a fly is more like the thrill of hunting. Thomas, the Hobcaw fishing guide, had that feeling the first time he caught one two decades ago while fishing with a guide near McClellanville.
“It was a great experience to be wading around out there looking for a fish before you cast to it,” says Thomas, recalling that first encounter with “Big Red.” “Instead of just throwing a line out there and hoping that something would come by, you are actually stalking the fish, and waiting until you get close enough to make a good cast on it.”
Fly fishing for red drum usually begins in late April or early May. That’s when tiny fiddler crabs start to appear in the shallow waters and mud flats along the coast. Red drum spend their winters in deeper waters and are only lured into the shallows by the fiddlers, which for the next several months will make up about 80 percent of their diet.
Anglers time their forays into the field with the rise and fall of the tide. Unusually high tides that occur on either side of a full moon or a new moon by two or three days are best, although fishing trips are normally timed around the twice-daily high tides. This rise in water level allows reds to move out of the now-flooded coastal streams and into the shallows over the mud flats where the crabs are busy munching on dead plants and digging labyrinths of tunnels deep in the soft earth.
Anglers wade through the water, trying to be quiet while at the same time keeping an eye out for a telltale red drum fin cutting the water’s surface or the wagging of a tail out of water—called tailing—as the red burrows its nose in the mud in search of fiddler crabs. “Once you see that fin or tail, you try to be as quiet as you can and get as close as possible so you can make a decent cast,” says Thomas. “Some people can cast a little further than other people, but it is the accuracy of the cast that counts rather than distance.”
On the day that Thomas caught his 10-pounder, he used a fly that he had tied himself just a few days before: an assembly of gold Mylar, thin gold tinsel called Flashabou, and a tiny rattle, all skillfully shaped to resemble a shrimp. It is, he says, one of his most successful patterns.
“What you’re trying to do with a fly is imitate a crab or a shrimp that might be up on the flats at the same time as the fish,” says Thomas. “But I don’t think it makes a lot of difference. I think anything that moves and catches their eye will make them think that it is something to eat and they will run over and grab it.”By the end of November, as temperatures drop, fiddler crabs begin a months-long period of dormancy. With their abundant food supply now gone, the older sexually mature reds leave the estuaries and move offshore while younger ones seek out food in deeper creeks. And Thomas, hanging up his waders for the season, uses kayaks to pursue the reds in shallow water at low tide until the highly anticipated return of the fiddlers and the red drum in the spring.
Besides the flat-out, heart-pounding physical challenge of fishing for red drum, there also is a sensory component to the process that goes largely unspoken among anglers, but which nonetheless registers in some special part of their psyche: It is the swishing sound of spartina grass brushing against neoprene waders and the gentle skittering of tens of thousands of fiddler crabs as they move through the marsh. And there is the pungent smell of decomposing vegetation and the sight of tiny periwinkle snails clinging to slender stalks of grass.
Overhead, red-tailed hawks, brown pelicans, eagles and ospreys ride the wind, on the lookout for an easy meal far below. And, of course, there are the sounds of fish tails slapping the water and the whipping of fly lines slicing through the air.
Finally, there is the weather— almost always hot and humid during the summer and often wonderfully unpredictable. Less than an hour after Thomas landed and then released his fish, a powerful northbound thunderstorm rolled through the area, darkening the sky and bringing with it lightning and heavy rain that banged down on the top of Thomas’s pickup. Inside, Thomas and his friends traded fishing stories and waited for the storm to dissipate. Later, as they parted and nosed their vehicles homeward through the rain, each would carry with them the memory of Steve Thomas wrestling the big red that he caught on a homemade fly. And each would be looking forward to his next hunt for Big Red.
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Get There
Interested in joining Steve Thomas on a red drum fly-fishing adventure? Visit hobcawbarony.org or call (843) 397-0592. Guided trips are $250 per person and include fishing tackle. Although Thomas is the only fly-fishing guide at Hobcaw, numerous other guides are available to lead anglers to red drum in other parts of the South Carolina coast.
A list of those guides and their contact information can be found at gofishsc.com. To learn more about red drum, visit the Department of Natural Resources online at dnr.sc.gov/marine/species/reddrum.