We arrived in Buxton with high hopes of catching a lot of sharks for the first 5 nights of our trip. We got on 64 East and shortly ran into a delay. Once we got past that, we arrived in Buxton about 4:30 PM. We checked into the Lighthouse View Hotel and then off to the beach. We caught a few little fish for bait and added that to the bait we bought at Frank and Fran's and set up for the sharks. A few hours later after sitting in a virtual sandstorm....off to bed we went. This scenario played itself out for all of the five nights. The sharks never cooperated. We did get to test our stuff out on big old useless rays. David battled a nice sized Butterfly Ray while I caught severalCow Nosed rays. All were kinda fun but got old quickly.
We did have a lot of success catching bait from the Ocean and in the sound. We kept the Ocean mullet alive and caught several really nice Bluefish one day. The small fish were plentiful and we caught Bluefish, Flounder, Whiting, Croaker, Spot, Black Drum, Pompano, Blowfish, Sheepshead and the rays. There were several very nice sunsets and I took a few pictures of those during the slow times, which was almost all the time.
As far as the Tournament, it rained harder than I have seen down there before, the wind blew at a crazy speed from the South the whole time and the Animal Grass and then even worse, the Sargassum weed was making it almost impossible to fish. We did find times when we could at low tide, especially at the "trout hole" South of ramp 34. We caught as many eating sized fish as you could ever want there on the last day, but no drum. I used as much as 20 ounces and as little as 6 ounces during the tournament. There was still alot of fun to go around and even a rainbow to send us on our way at the end of the trip. Going to go back over Thanksgiving to get a little revenge on those fish I hope.
Cape Hatteras (Avon & Buxton)
