There is a small stretch of North Carolina about eight feet wide and forty feet long, at the far end of an Outer Banks fishing pier, that operates under its own laws. Getting a spot out there is not a matter of paying admission. It is a matter of years. The men who fish the end have rod holders bolted to the rail with their initials on them, coolers with cushions on top that function as assigned seating, and a way of nodding at a newcomer that manages to be perfectly friendly and completely uninviting at the same time.
What they are doing is pin-rigging, which is one of the more elegantly ridiculous things anybody does with a fishing rod. First you catch a live bluefish or a menhaden on a light outfit off the middle of the pier. Then you carry it, sloshing, to the end. Then you clip it to a heavy rod under a float and let the current walk the whole arrangement two hundred yards out past the breakers, until your bait is swimming around in open ocean an absurd distance from where you are standing, and you are effectively fishing a boat spot with your feet on dry lumber. Then everybody waits and talks about hurricanes.
King mackerel are the point. A king comes through a live bait like a thrown knife, and half the time the first thing anybody knows about it is that the float is gone and the reel is making a noise nobody wants to be responsible for. Then comes the part the piers were built for, which is a hundred-yard walk down the rail with a running fish while five other men clear their lines ahead of you without being asked and one of them narrates the whole event to the tourists. The fish comes up under the pier at the end, and it gets brought aboard in a drop net on a rope, and the drop net is operated by whoever has been out there longest.
We stood at the end for two days in late August with a thermos of coffee that got embarrassing by ten in the morning and we caught bluefish, a spanish mackerel, one enormously offended blowfish, and a lot of information about a nor easter in 1998. On the second afternoon a smoker king took a bait off the rail two spots down from us, and the walk lasted eleven minutes, and it came up in the net at what somebody called thirty-eight pounds. The man who caught it did not celebrate. He rebaited.
On our way off the pier that evening the ticket booth man asked how we did. We said we watched a good one. He said that is most of it, and made change for the next fellow.
Long days in the sun call for a hooded sun shirt. See our UPF 50+ fishing shirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.