NCCHARTERFISHING-Capt.'s Jeff Cronk and MIke Taylor-Crystal Coast, Swansboro, Emerald Isle

This morning I had the Stephenson group on for some extremely cold conditions. Shawn and his buddy showed up about 5:45 this morning and we were off.... with the air temp at 27 degrees and the wind whipping about 15mph from the NW.... The wind chill was about 20 degrees or less and you could tell as a little salt water would spray into the boat and freeze on the floor. The trout bite I was on yesterday had been found out by others and a couple boats were already anchored up when we arrived at daybreak... We gave it a short while and picked up one about 3.5lbs with a puppydrum. Rather than get all over everyone we moved on to search for redfish. Fingers barely working, I tied on some heavier jigheads and just as soon as we got onto the flats we came onto a school of several thousand reds ranging from 24in to 30in. We covered about nine miles of shoals this morning and found schools of reds all over. We wound up landing between 30 and 40 reds and made it back to the dock around noon. Awsome fishing today with a couple of tough guys... excellent fishermen. ps. ICW surface water temp was 37 at daybreak and low 40's at noon. The surf water temp was at upper 40's all day. That's colder than it ever got all of last winter and we're not even into December yet.... Yikes! We might have a good run of Striper Finally! I'm ready for those 20 to 30lbers on medium spinning tackle and topwater baits!

Capt. Jeff Cronk

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