Autumn offers opportunity for Grand Strand’s game fishing and hunting “Surf and Turf”
Autumn marks that time of year when the action is hot on the water and in the woods along the Carolina coast, and Dr. Jason Rosenberg of Pawleys Island took full advantage last Wednesday.
Rosenberg likes to call his autumn escapades Surf and Turf, and this Wednesday offered a rare instance lately of manageable seas to get offshore on his 32-foot Contender, Painkiller.
Fishing came first, and Rosenberg along with Capt. Jay Sconyers, Dr. Edward Verville and Rick Rosenberg headed out at daybreak for the Winyah Scarp and McMarlen Ledge vicinity, some 60-65 miles to the east of Murrells Inlet.
The plan was high-speed trolling for wahoo, and the crew deployed three lines using Sconyers’ homemade lures with 20, 40 and 60-ounce in-line weights to cover plenty of the water column.
Within 20 minutes, they had a double hook-up with a pair of wahoo hitting an orange/black and a red/purple lure.
Rick Rosenberg and Dr. Verville took the rods, with Verville working his fish to the boat first.
Dr. Rosenberg applied the gaff to the fish, but quickly found out just how big it was. Sconyers broke out a second gaff and the duo pulled a large wahoo that later proved to be a 68-pounder into the boat.
Moments later, Rick Rosenberg had the second wahoo ready for the gaff, and a 40-pounder was quickly on the deck.
One more wahoo hookup resulted in half a fish being reeled in, with a mako shark the likely culprit.
The fishing portion of the day concluded in spectacular fashion around noon when a strike on the long line, with the 60-ounce in-line weight, produced a surprise late-season hook-up.
“We were expecting another wahoo, and were amazed when we saw a bill poking through the surface,” said Jason Rosenberg.
Rosenberg and Verville teamed to reel in a nice sailfish, which was released.
With plenty of wahoo in the box, they headed in, and arrived back to the inlet at 2 p.m.
By 4:30 p.m., Rosenberg had driven from the northeast corner of Georgetown County, Garden City Beach, to private land in the southern section of the county and climbed into a tree stand, with his eyes peeled for a mature white-tail buck.
Right after sunset, at about 5:30 p.m., Rosenberg spotted what he was looking for.
“Out to my left, I saw him for the first time,” said Rosenberg. “He was making his way across the clearing, hovering near the trees 125 yards away. He stopped and looked in my direction, perfectly broadside.”
Moments later after a couple of shots from his suppressed Remington 700, Rosenberg had downed a 9-point buck that later weighed in at 135 pounds at 707 Deer Processing in Socastee, an excellent buck for South Carolina’s coastal plain.
“I call it a perfect day, Georgetown County Surf and Turf,” said Rosenberg. “There are very few places in the country you can pull this off, making this one of the best places to live for an outdoorsman.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 1:42 PM.
