When the clear tide suddenly ran streaked with mud, Thomas jerked the boat off a plane. He poled around the corner into a basin teeming with redfish. Blue-tinged tails waved with brown mud and black oyster shells in relief. Scott, who spends most of his time guiding anglers to fish, looked eager as a sailor on furlough.
Scott Wagner hooks up in a Harbor River Basin.
“Show us how it’s done, Scotty,” I said. He fell short with his first cast, and as the white bucktail streamer plopped down, an oyster belched as if booing. Boy, Scott showed that oyster. With his next cast he placed the fly amongst three tails and threw a last-second reach into his cast so the fly line landed to the right of the fish. When the fish are nose down, you can get away with such an aggressive presentation. After a vigorous strip, the three reds must have head-butted each other charging it. The winner raced upstream and around a mound, so Scott raised the rod high overhead just as I have seen him do a thousand times fighting reds in the Savannah marsh grass. Only marsh grass doesn’t peel the coating off of fly lines.
While Scott’s redfish fought in the next basin beyond a wall of mud and oysters, we watched the rest of the school settle in the basin above that one. Taking turns on the bow, we followed the school for several hours and the school joined other schools and then those schools joined others until we finally pinned them in a basin with only one outlet. Thomas hooked a final fish there, and it charged under the boat along with the entire huge gaggle. From the platform, I watched school after school churn through the maze.
By then, the tide was more than halfway out, so we relocated to broader basins closer to the channel where there was less chance of getting stuck. The low mounds and expansive basins gave us a view of Horse Island, and of a scene that is quintessential South Carolina. A dense, mossy hammock of centuries-old live oaks gives way to a rim of spartina grass that falls off into marsh grass and then oyster rakes. A small herd of marsh tacky horses, the ancestors of which date back to the colonial era, browsed the salty spartina grass. Occasionally, a bronze tail waved in the foreground. But, cloud cover had ruined the light.
“Make casts along the edges of the oysters,” Thomas said. “But throw a reach in your line so you don’t line any fish holding along the edge between us and where the fly lands.”
When blind casting along shorelines and bars, it is best to use spinning tackle and weedless jerkbaits or weedless spoons. You can cover much more water more quickly by casting parallel to the shore and retrieving the lure with the rodtip held high so that most of the line is out of the water and unlikely to run across a fish’s back. But we had no conventional tackle on board, so we relied on reach casts for a proper angle. Reach casting is simple: Make your cast parallel to the shoreline and as the leader turns over at the end of the loop lift the rodtip high and away from the shoreline. We shortened our leaders to about seven feet and switched to weedless spoonflies for this application. They are extremely wind resistant, and so not the easiest of flies to cast, but their brightness and fluttering action make them excellent prospectors. The first redfish I caught using this technique hit the spoonfly so hard it knocked the epoxy out of the wire frame.
“Why, those Savannah fish seem downright lethargic by comparison,” I teased Scott, who also goes through tons of epoxy.
We released a couple more redfish before the little eddies behind the clusters of oysters disappeared, and after such a superb afternoon, slack tide seemed like an invitation to cocktail hour in quaint, historic downtown Beaufort. Sipping cocktails under a live oak, I realized fully why my peripatetic fly-fishing buddy settled here. He talked about South Carolina’s successful conservation programs compared to the neighboring states, including the two-fish limit, the scientifically derived slot sizes, and an outstanding stocking program. But, he met his wife here on a visit, plus his ancestors come from the area. And, while gentility permeates the town atmosphere, an immense marine wilderness—more water than you could possibly explore in a lifetime—surrounds it. Thomas Maybank’s easy disposition fits in well here, and the bountiful waters give his free spirit ample freedom.
