Outdoors column: Red drum stocking successful

The tide in Murrells Inlet was high, just starting to fall, when Garden City Beach resident Charlie Nash eased his 21-foot Sea Hunt into a creek off the main channel at about 10 a.m. The calendar read late August and the night before had thankfully offered a slight reprieve from the torrid summer heat, with lows dipping into the lower 70s.

Nash pulled to a spot about 50 feet off a Spartina bank, broken up by a few tiny tidal creeks, and tossed the anchor off the bow. Nash, along with local angler Jim Baldwin and I, let the conditions from our arrival settle down and soon began floating 2-to-3 inch finger mullet along the bank and an adjacent oyster bar. The bank was alive with activity from mullet, menhaden and shrimp and there were signs our quarry - the red drum - was lurking in the vicinity.

We first missed on a few shots at fish but when the tide was almost halfway to low, the bite really turned on. In a little over an hour we caught six red drum - known by some locals as spottails and others as redfish - all near the upper range of South Carolina's slot limit of 15 to 23 inches.

Three fish, right at 21-22 inches, went into the cooler and three were carefully released, meaning only one-third of the legal limit of nine for the three anglers was harvested. A 16-inch flounder was added to the cooler as a fish fry bonus.

While all the bites were aggressive, one of the redfish attacked the mullet and raced along the outside of the oyster bar, pulling the float along against the strong falling current and putting up an awe-inspiring fight on the 12-pound class spinning tackle.

"When they pick up that line, you know exactly what you've got and I'm going to tell you right now, you better have everything set just right or you're not going to get the fish," said Nash. "They're a terrific fish to catch and just really a great sporting activity for any angler."

The stock of red drum in South Carolina's estuaries and others across the Southeast have made a fine comeback from the gloomy days of the early-to-mid 1990s when their numbers were left dangerously low by too many years of lax recreational limits and inshore gill-netting, which was eliminated in most states in the late 1980s.

"I was a member of the generation that overfished, and overhunted too," said Baldwin, a 70-year resident of Little River. "We thought that the ocean would always have more fish than you could catch and that turned out not to be true. If somebody had not come along and set some limits and done some stocking, we'd be out of fish. It took a while for everybody in my generation to do it different. We got a lot more [conscious] of releasing fish and paying attention to the limits."

Smallish estuaries such as Murrells Inlet and Little River are typical of South Carolina's northern coast and receive heavy fishing pressure from visitors and the growing population of locals. Both Nash and Baldwin point to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources' Red Drum Stock Enhancement Project as being critical in establishing a solid stock of red drum in the two small inlets.

"Murrells Inlet is a little itty, bitty place and Cherry Grove and Little River is also a small place," said Dr. Mike Denson of the S.C. DNR, who has worked with the Red Drum Stock Enhancement Project for the last 17 years.

The project has stocked 2.4 million juvenile red drum in Murrells Inlet from 2002 to 2009 and 150,000 in the Little River/Cherry Grove vicinity from 2006 to 2009. Three different sizes of red drum have been stocked, small 1-2 inch fry, medium-size 5-6 inch fingerlings and larger juveniles ranging from 12-15 inches.

The majority of the fish stocked in the Little River vicinity were the large juveniles.

"The state of South Carolina is doing a great job with the restocking program of redfish in South Carolina," said Nash. "They've done a good job of really and truly rebuilding the population of redfish in this state. If someone wants to go catch redfish, there are plenty of them out there. I think it's going to stay that way for a while."

Nash, who has 20 years of fishing experience in Murrells Inlet, has seen first-hand the improvement in the numbers of red drum since stocking in the inlet began in 2002.

"The difference is like day and night," said Nash. "Before, you could catch some redfish, you could catch one or two - maybe. Now if you go to the right spot, you can catch them almost any time you want to go. I really believe the redfish is here to stay."

Denson provided some startling numbers that indicate just how big an impact the stocking program is having and can continue to have on small estuaries such as Murrells Inlet.

DNR biologists compile data from what Denson calls "the freezer program" where anglers turn in cleaned carcasses of keeper-size red drum to Murrells Inlet businesses. Data is also obtained from anglers who are authorized to provide biologists with small dorsal fin clips from red drum and then release them.

By analyzing that genetic material, biologists are able to identify not only whether the fish is wild or was released by DNR, but which group of released fish it may have come from. Each group of red drum released can be separately identified by the genetic characteristics of their parents, providing a genetic fingerprint, or in this case a finprint.

In 2006, a whopping 78 percent of the fish analyzed from Murrells Inlet were stocked fish. In 2009, 31 percent were stocked fish.

The stocking program could become even more efficient in future years in the small estuaries of the Grand Strand.

"We've learned a lot about these estuaries in the last several years," said Denson. "What we find in these small estuaries is small fish, fry, by stocking those, we don't get a very good survival rate or recruitment. The larger size fish seemed to make a larger contribution and the smaller fish seem to die or they left and went into another estuary and have been recaptured in Winyah Bay.''

Denson also noted DNR estimates the population of red drum in Murrells Inlet - using the Petersen estimate method - is at about 10,000 fish.