The thing nobody believes about the Pamlico is how shallow it is. It is the largest sound on the East Coast, big enough to have real weather of its own and to build a chop that will rearrange your kidneys, and most of it is somewhere between eight and fifteen feet deep. You run twenty minutes out of Oriental in September, look around, see no land worth mentioning in any direction, and then drop an anchor into water that would not cover a two story house.
Down there in the last of the warm months are red drum that make the slot fish everybody catches in the marsh look like bait. Forty pounds is ordinary. Fifty happens. These are old animals, twenty and thirty years of them, and they come into the sound to spawn near the mouth of the Neuse, which is why nobody who fishes for them properly keeps one. You get a picture in the water, you get the hook out, and you hold the fish alongside until it decides on its own to leave.
The fishing itself is almost embarrassingly simple, which is a relief after a summer of trying to be clever. Fresh cut mullet, a fish finder rig, a circle hook big enough to hang a coat on, and four rods out the back with the drags set loose. Then you wait. The bite is a dusk and dark business, and the hour before it happens is the best hour in the whole sport. The sound goes glass, the sky over the marsh line turns the color of a peach that has gone slightly too far, and somebody in the boat inevitably says that this alone was worth the ride, and means it, for about eleven minutes.
You hear them before anything else. Drum drum, from underneath the hull, a low knocking that the males make with their swim bladder, and it carries through the fiberglass and into your feet. Then a reel gives up line in a way that no other fish in that water does, slow and heavy and completely unbothered, and the rest of the night stops being peaceful. We put six in the boat between full dark and eleven, biggest one right at forty seven inches, which took two of us to lift and one of us to complain about it afterward.
We ran back in by GPS and old landmarks with the fish smell on everybody and nothing at all in the cooler, which is a strange way to feel successful. My father in law said it was the best night of fishing he had had in five years and then asked, twice, whether we were really sure about not keeping just the one.
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