Fly and Light Tackle Adventures: Topsail, Bald Head, Carolina Beach, and Southport

       After an exceptionally hectic day yesterday, I decided to reset the clock to "Cape Fear Time", and hit the marsh about an hour before sunset and the coming New Moon high tide. I left the dock with the camera and a few friends in the cooler, no fishing gear, that's not what these soul cleansing experiences are about sometimes. A short run to some very active marsh pans(deeper depressions in the marsh interior created by accumulated dead grass brought in with high spring tides, the firm bottom bottom and lack of tightly clustered old growth Spartina means dense colonies of Fiddler and Calico Crabs, a Red's favorite forage) and I saw what I came to see... multiple Reds happily tailing all around the boat. So there I sat, atop the platform camera and beverage in hand in the silence and isolation of the deep marsh as the ethereal scene played out before me. No matter how many times I see ol' Sciaenops Ocellatus act out this most basic of feeding behaviors, I feel like it is being performed just for me, those tails waving above the surface their way of communicating in a language that only those of us who passionatley follow their aquatic movements day in and day out understand! I mentioned camera, which moves me to admit my one shortcoming when it comes to having high quality gear on board. You see, my trusty digital camera is of the 1999 vintage, and so hoplessly incrusted with salt and an unknown black substance with both the properties of a liquid and solid? that my photographs are suffering.  Any way, the spectacle of the Cape Fear once again has managed to fill me with a Peace that is second to only that granted by God!