Late August Fishing Report

Thought I would jump on today and give a little fishing report. The Past few days I have been fishing the water from Wrightsville Beach to Surf City. I have mainly been Sightfishing for redfish as well as a little bit of flounder fishing. This week the tide has been low during the first half of the day and I have been starting around 7:30 am. Topwater fishing has been great with a few nice blowups each morning from redfish. The topwater bite for me has been dying off around 9am each day as the sun gets up. I have been throwing a chartreuse head white body one knocker by Heddon as well as a custom painted on knocker that looks like the 807 skitterwalk by rapala. I really feel like the redfish like the pitch of a one knocker a bit better. (I will include a picture) Once the topwater bite has died off I have been targeting flounder on the docks as well as some of the deeper edges and confluences in the creeks. It seems like there are still a bunch of flounder off the beach on the nearshore wrecks but the inshore flounder fishing is definetly picking up. We have hooked keepers every day. For the flounder I have been throwing the 3/8 oz Redfish Eye jig head by Eye Strike Fishing paired with a 3 inch new penny shrimp with chartreuse tail which is a Berkley Gulp bait. I have been able to stay on the flounder well through the falling tide but once it bottoms out it has been back to redfish. I have a handful of spots that have been producing nice upper slot redfish on the incoming tide. The sight fishing has been much more productive on the incoming tide with fish belly crawling and floating high in the water column flashing. When sight fishing I have been throwing a voodoo shrimp or a hand tied shrimp pattern fly on the fly rod. There are plenty of big mullet in the marshes but the smaller bait is still a bit scarce. The redfish I have been finding have been in areas where there is an abundance of oyster bars but also broken grass edges where the water is flooding the grass even during a normal high tide. It seems that there are more shrimp around now than finger mullet and they redfish are definitely keying in on them. If you see shrimp popping along the edges of the spartina grass when the water is low you are in the right spot.