Shark Fishing with Balloon Fisher King

Some days, when the conditions are good, it’s fun to just go out and mess around. Recently, I did that with my wife, my 11 year old son, one of his good buddies, and a neighbor friend of mine on an afternoon half-day charter with Capt. Brant McMullen of Ocean Isle Fishing Center – www.oifc.com.

With the Spanish nowhere to be found nearshore that afternoon, and the kingfish still scattered from all the recent rainfall, our plan was to hit some of the local reefs within 10 miles off the Brunswick county beaches to see if we could find a few blacktip shark for some fun. We were not disappointed.

We used Spanish Mackerel as cut bait along with Bluerunners, Grey Trout and “noisy” Croakers as live bait (the boys caught them off the bottom using sabiki rigs) all afternoon under Balloon Fisher King rigs. We had 3 lines out and the action was constant with strikes on all the lines, including double hook-ups. We had a few break offs, but otherwise the Balloon Clips worked flawlessly and we ended up landing black nose, lemon and several blacktip sharks including one 5 footer which my son’s friend battled for about 40 minutes.

It was a fun offshore day and can’t wait to do it again!