Watching the tides and knowing the location and characteristics of creeks are key ingredients in guide Chris Elliot's game plan for catching summer redfish. Photo by Dan Kibler

On a lot of coastal highway maps, they're the little blue lines that are hardly wider than a pencil lead.

On chart maps, they're slightly larger, but often not enough to really look inviting enough to run your skiff in there for a look the next time you're motoring up the Intracoastal Waterway looking for a new place to catch puppy drum.

But coastal creeks and small coastal rivers can be tremendous and underutilized fishing holes for the enterprising fisherman who is willing to invest some time learning the twists and turns of those bodies of water.

Depending on the season, those streams can hold puppy drum, speckled trout, flounder and sheepshead, among other species of interest to North Carolina's inshore anglers, and they can be excellent places to go when you don't feel like heading to the briny deep.

From Cape Lookout south to the South Carolina line, where barrier islands are separated from the mainland by narrow sounds and waterways, creeks are a real option for fishermen who don't have the biggest boats and the biggest outboard motors. In fact, big boats and big motors might not be the best outfits for getting back into a creek that only holds 3 feet of water at mean low tide.

Places like Spooner's, Hoop Pole, Mill, Calico and Ward's creeks in the Cape Lookout area; Page's, Bradley, Hewletts and Whiskey creeks around Wrightsville Beach; Cape and Cedar around Baldhead Island; Dickenson and Walden's creeks around Southport; the Shallotte and Lockwood Folly rivers west of the sprawling Cape Fear River are all areas where fishermen like Chris Elliott, Rick Bennett, Jimmy Price and Hunter McCray, with a bait tank full of minnows or shrimp, might find plenty to do for a morning or an afternoon.

Elliott is a pro bass fisherman from the coastal town of Gloucester, and he works the waters around Cape Lookout regularly. He believes that jerking a lot of puppy drum, speckled trout and flounder out of creeks in his area is a matter of understanding what kinds of places hold fish and how the rising and falling tides affect their feeding habits.

"When you're back in the creeks around here, you don't have a lot of oyster rocks, so you'll be looking for wood -- laydowns, piers and docks," Elliott said (252-729-9925). "I know from going (electro) shocking with a buddy of mine who works for the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries that there will be all kinds of puppy drum and trout holding around a laydown. He'll pull the shocking boat up to a laydown, hit the (electricity) button, and all kinds of fish will pop up.

"So you're really looking for anything that breaks up the bank: either old, rotten boats, docks, laydowns -- if they're around deep water. And any bend on the outside of a creek will have deeper water, so you fish it; you fish the deeper holes."

He believes that normally fishing a falling tide is better because in high water the fish can become dispersed and therefore harder to pattern. When the tide is falling out toward low tide, water levels of course drop and the number of locations that are prime feeding stations drop with it. The fish have to move into a more compacted area. A lot of the tidal creeks around here have little ditches that run off into the marsh, and when the water is falling, they're perfect places to catch fish.

"I usually fish the mouth of those little ditches when the water is falling out because that's where the little baitfish will be concentrated," Elliott noted. "Those will be prime spots. If you've got good water depth back in the ditches, you can make a few casts back in there. I don't think the size of the creek matters as long as it's got enough water in it and enough bait to hold fish."