October
King Mackerel
Cape Lookout
Big kings will be just about everywhere around Cape Lookout in October, from the sea buoy at Beaufort Inlet all the way to good live bottom 10 or 12 miles off the beach on the east side of the Cape Lookout shoals.

Joe Shute of Capt. Joe’s Bait & Tackle in Atlantic Beach (252/240-2744) runs charter trips for kings in the fall and keeps up with the whereabouts of the great majority of fish being caught.

He said that spots that hold fish are easily located on chart maps: 30-minute rock, 1700 rock, East rock, Northwest places, Big 10/Little 10.

“For most of October, you can do pretty good fishing just off the beach, but you tend to do better on the bigger fish a little farther offshore,” Shute said. “There’s a lot of really good hard bottom about 12 to 15 miles off the beach on the east side of the shoals; that’s where I do a lot of my fishing.”

Shute said that live menhaden or dead cigar minnows are the primary baits used by fishermen, but anglers also catch plenty of kings trolling big plugs: Yo-Zuri deep-divers, Megabaits and Stretch 25s.

November
Speckled Trout
Wrightsville Beach
November is clearly the best month of the year to catch nice specks in the Wrightsville Beach area, with fish showing up everywhere.

With plenty of baitfish and shrimp in the water in a number of different places, fishermen can expect to catch fish around the jetties at Masonboro Inlet, in deep holes in Mason’s Inlet, and along marsh banks everywhere else — behind Rich’s Inlet, in creeks and in the Intracoastal Waterway.

Guide Rick Bennett of Rodman Charters (910/799-6120) said that he fishes live shrimp on a Carolina rig in the deep water around Mason’s Inlet or the Masonboro Inlet jetties. When he fishes the skinny water around marsh banks, he uses a 1/4-ounce leadhead jig with a 3-inch Gulp Swimming Minnow. When he’s in the 5- to 10-foot water, he likes to fish jerkbaits like a Rapala X-Rap or a series 2000 MirrOLure.

“What you fish depends on where you’re fishing and when you’re fishing,” Bennett said. “You can catch ’em a number of different ways.”

December
Striped Bass
Lake Hickory
Fishing for early-winter stripers at Lake Hickory can be a blast, as the fish seem to sense that extremely cold weather is on the way, and they prepare for it by feeding heavily.

“The stripers at Hickory know when January gets here it will be so cold they’ll just about go to sleep,” said guide Jeff Tomlin of Statesville (704/902-7246). “When they feel the water temperature get down into the 50s, they know it’s time to fatten up.”

Hickory has been known in recent years as a good lake to find stripers between 10 and 20 pounds, with an occasional beast mixed in. December is a great month on the lower end of the lake, from the Route 127 bridge down to Oxford Dam, as fish move down the river channel and spread on main-lake flats to feed.

Tomlin likes to fish live gizzard shad or blueback herring on free lines or side-planer boards, almost slow-trolling them along using only his electric trolling motor for power. He probes areas with 15 to 20 feet of water on the deep ends of flats, often finding fish as shallow as 8 to 10 feet. Subtle underwater points, humps, sharp dropoffs or even stumpfields and brushpiles will hold stripers during the winter. They aren’t really bunched up, but you can expect to find several fish in an area if you catch the first one.

Find more about North Carolina fishing and hunting at: NCgameandfish.com