336 
FOREST 
AND 
STREAM 
The Fighting Bass of Topsail 
Think of a Morning’s Sport Which Yielded Five Game Fish With an Aggregate Weight of One Hundred and 
Thirty-four Pounds 
HE character of the North Caro¬ 
lina coast has much influence 
on the variety and abundance 
of fish life found in that sec¬ 
tion. Nearly the entire littoral 
is skirted by low, narrow, sandy 
islands, between which and the 
mainland there are numer¬ 
ous sounds, communicating with the ocean 
through narrow in'ets or through other sounds. 
In the southeastern coastal region of the state, 
there are a series of connecting sounds, bearing 
different names at different stretches, and form¬ 
ing a continuous body of shallow water about 
sixty miles long and one-and-a-quarter miles 
wide at its widest part. The names of these 
connecting sounds in geographical order from 
north to south are: Stump, Topsail, Middle, 
Wrightsville, Masonboro and Myrtle. Of these 
six we are concerned with Topsail. 
In days of old when the North Carolina coast 
was the hunting ground of the buccaneers, 
those adventurous gentlemen cruising out to sea 
in their rakish craft, could plainly discern over 
the low, sandy island, the small vessels of hon¬ 
est traders plying up and down the sounds; that 
is, the pirates could see their prey in every sound 
except Topsail, and here the intervening dunes 
rose so high that only the topsails of vessels in 
the sound were visible from the ocean. Of 
course the coasting craft of those days drew 
very little water, and it is quite possible that the 
sounds and inlets were deeper then than they are 
now—but this is the origin of the names: Top¬ 
sail Sound, Topsail Beach and Topsail Inlet. 
And it is the greatest place for channel bass 
I ever saw. 
Surf casting for this gamy fish has not re¬ 
ceived the attention it deserves from scientific 
anglers for the simple reason that they have 
not known where to go to find them. No true 
sportsman likes to be classed as a “fish hog,” 
but after procuring expensive tackle, learning to 
cast, and expending valuable time and money on 
a fishing trip, one does like to catch a fish once 
in awhile. No two channel bass fight exactly 
alike, and if after taking his first fish, the an¬ 
gler must wait an entire year before capturing 
his second, how is he to estimate the average 
fighting quality of his quarry? And this is not 
an unusual experience in some sections I know of. 
It was to “get a line” on the channel bass, in 
more ways than one, that I went to Topsail. I 
had been fairly successful with these fish before 
I went there; had had my catches recorded “in 
the paper,” and taken some rather valuable prizes 
in the club—all of which may mean a lot or 
nothing according to the prevailing standards— 
but my first evening at Topsail I distinguished 
myself by losing four channel bass, one after 
the other, in an hour’s time, and then landed a 
By B. C. Clapp. 
wicked-looking sand shark of about twenty-five 
pounds. 
It was a tired and disgusted Jersey fisherman 
who dragged himself across the sand dunes to 
camp in the gathering darkness, and who, to the 
Cicerone’s Job-like consolation that “everyone 
who comes to Topsail loses his first fish,” made 
no response. How the deuce could it have 
happened? Never had I seen fish fight as these 
did—they seemed endowed with the mentality of 
a Socrates and the agility of an acrobat. 
Never mind; I’d get on to their curves yet— 
only I saw that some things learned in the North 
must be unlearned here, for different condi¬ 
tions demand different measures. 
The morning ushered in Sunday—a regular 
Billy Sunday—for a nor’east gale springing up 
over night, howled and stormed and raved, and 
piled the white surf high on the sands, sweeping 
the lower extremity of the island from ocean to 
sound with a boiling flood. It was impossible to 
fish as we could neither cast nor hold. 
It dawned bright and clear, with wind dead 
north and a considerable sea running but not so 
high but what we could fish, and about two 
o’clock in the afternoon on the incoming tide, we 
prepared to embark across the Inlet to try the 
South beach, which seemed the more likely 
ground after the storm. 
“I want you to do something for us to-day,” 
the Cicerone admonished the writer as we 
stepped into the boat, and the latter humbly 
promised that he “would try,” though the mem¬ 
ory of those four lost fish still rankled in his 
mind. He had discarded his cherished gut 
leaders, which he had always used in this style 
of fishing in the North, for a rig somewhat sim¬ 
ilar to a tarpon trolling rig; i. e., to the eye of 
a 9-0 hand forged O’Shaughnessy hook was at¬ 
tached 2 y 2 inches of fine but strong chain, and 
to this chain, an 18-inch length of 3-ply twisted 
steel wire, making a fine but exceedingly strong 
connection between hook and three-way swivel. 
Gut leaders, it may be remarked in passing, 
are absolutely useless in channel bass fishing in 
the South. In the first place, the action of the 
current on the large mullet baits used untwists 
the strands of gut and kinks the leader; in the 
second place, where large fish are landed one 
after another, and where big sharks abound, gut 
quickly wears out. Unless one is prepared to 
change one’s leader and gut-snelled hook after 
each fish—a troublesome job when they are bit¬ 
ing fast—one had better give up gut and use 
wire. The chain connection between hook and 
leader gives perfect freedom of motion at that 
point and saves many a fish which might other¬ 
wise pry loose. 
Ralph, our colored man, brought us safely 
across the Inlet, and a party of five ardent surf 
casters hurried down the beach to take coveted 
positions before the school struck in. 
The tide was about four hours in when we cast 
out, and almost immediately one of our party 
struck and landed a fifteen-pounder. Then the 
writer broke his luck by landing a ten-pounder, 
and after that the fun was fast and furious. 
To sum it all up: in a little over four hours, 
five men hooked and landed thirteen channel bass 
having an aggregate weight of 308 pounds, all of 
which fish were returned alive to the water after 
being weighed. One man had eight strikes and 
landed only four fish of the possible eight, and 
another man had four strikes and landed only 
one. The writer is pleased to announce that he 
landed every fish hooked, five in all having an 
aggregate weight of 134 pounds. This is said 
not in self praise but in self justification. 
I couldn’t keep it up though. During a stay 
of eighteen days at Topsail I figure that I lost 
fully twenty-five per cent, of fish hooked, and 
that I landed eighteen channel bass having an 
aggregate weight of 470,14 pounds, my largest fish 
weighing 36 pounds and my smallest, 10 pounds. 
During the eighteen days I was there, our party 
landed fifty channel bass of a total weight of 
1,286 pounds. The largest fish caught weighed 
45 pounds and the second largest, 4314 pounds 
All of these fish, except a few small ones saved 
for the table, were returned alive to the water; 
that is, except three others of which I have 
written in a previous issue of Forest and Stream. 
I would not be misunderstood as saying that 
the channel bass of the Carolinas fight harder 
than those of the Jersey Coast—and yet I’m not 
quite sure but what they do. The South is the 
home of Sciaena Ocellata, and a fish invariably 
fights better in its native waters. Nearly all 
the channel bass I have caught North ran 
straight out to sea at a steady gait, but these 
Southern fish invariably did a lively tango on 
the run—that frequent head shaking with which 
every channel bass fisherman is familiar. “Ani¬ 
mated fireworks” someone has styled the spec¬ 
tacular gyrations of the hooked tarpon, and 
these Southern channel bass reminded me, in a 
way, of the tarpon; only, of course, they do not 
leap, and their contortions are of the submarine 
variety—felt by the angler rather than seen. 
The swift current of Topsail helps the play 
of the fish mightily. When hooked they swim 
quarteringly with it and thus double the resist¬ 
ance on rod and line. One night I fought a 
channel bass as hard as I could for over an 
hour. It seemed that I never could land him; 
and as I stood on that desolate beach point alone 
in the darkness, changing the rod from one hand 
to the other to rest my tired muscles, roseate • 
dreams of capturing a record-breaker nerved me 
to the wearisome task. But when, at last, the 
fish was beached, he weighed only thirty pounds 
—I had been fighting a thirty-pound fish and a 
nine-mile current at the same time. 
