The neighborly sport of pier fishing along the Grand Strand
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Chester Doyle of Conway is a regular at the 2nd Avenue Pier. "The only thing my wife never bugs me about is my fishing." |
If Chester Doyle ever subscribed to anything like an angler’s creed, it might be what he told me when I met him one winter morning at his regular spot on the 2nd Avenue Pier in Myrtle Beach.
“The only two things I love more than fishing? Jesus and my wife,” he said.
There are the casual pier anglers—the families on vacation who fish for a week every summer—and then there are the die-hards—those who come out more than five times per week, every month, for years.
Chester Doyle, a member of Horry Electric Cooperative, is perhaps the quintessential diehard. Tall and broad-shouldered, with the imposing stance and clipped speech of an ex-Marine, he’s been fishing the 2nd Avenue Pier for more than 20 years, and he only aims for two species: speckled trout in the winter and sheepshead in the spring and summer.
“He sure can catch ’em,” his regular fishing buddy and fellow Horry Electric Cooperative member, Ronnie Hunter, said.
Indeed, Doyle possesses a kind of insider’s knowledge about all things related to pier fishing, including an abundance of stories—“I won the rodeo back in ’89 for speckled trout”—and a comic disdain for newbies and tourists. He has the phrase, “$1 to look” inked in black marker on the top of his cooler.
Doyle’s success did not come easily. He is adamant about the fact that he honed his technique by learning from three 2nd Avenue Pier icons—Roy Brigham, Buck Scott and Derrick Rogers—and now he fishes at least five days per week, going through nearly three gallons of barnacles in that time.
Yes, Doyle fishes with barnacles for bait. He drives 30 minutes down from Conway, scrapes them off the jetty rocks, collects them in a bucket, pierces the hook through one, drops it down and waits. And waits some more.
“I’ve got patience for this stuff,” he said. “The one thing my wife never bugs me about is my fishing.”
And if the fish aren’t biting, then Doyle doesn’t sweat it. He and Hunter have been known to enjoy the leisurely pace of not catching any fish by engaging in boyish pranks— super-gluing someone’s rod tip to the pier, for example—or simply relaxing and sitting there quietly, taking their minds off everything.
But Doyle never takes his eyes off his rod, even if he’s talking to Hunter or to an inquisitive tourist, because there always might be that hard yank and that new personal record—a nine pound sheepshead—on the other end of the line.
A REMARKABLE THING ABOUT FISHING PIERS IS THE fact that die-hards like Chester Doyle can coexist as neighbors with vacationing families like the Kaisers and Chamberlains from North Carolina.
In fact, a few benches down from Doyle, 5‑year‑old Will Kaiser was nearly as confident as the master himself. He was going to catch not one, he said, but four fish on the 2nd Avenue Pier. It was only the Kaisers’ second-ever fishing outing as a family, but Will was wearing his lucky fishing shirt—a fluorescent tie-dye tee—and he was focused on the task at hand, bent over the pier railing and watching the line as it ran into the ocean.
His mother, Regina, however, was not so sure. She was content to see it more as a family outing than a fishing adventure.
“Fishing and waterslides. You come to Myrtle Beach, and those are things you want to do. Here it’s nice because it’s so high and you can look down, and there’s so much more you can look at,” she said, nodding toward a string of hotels and beachgoers and the new Sky Wheel spinning and towering in the distance. “And they rent the equipment.”
But sure enough, not an hour after breakfast, the rented rod tip twitched, the line started spooling off the reel and the Kaiser family had one on. Will’s father, Bill, set the hook and started reeling it in.
But then 15 seconds passed, and they weren’t making much progress. Nothing was coming up, and the line didn’t seem to be getting any closer.
Seeing what was happening, regular pier fisherman Kelly Maddox hurried over and tightened the drag for them, and they brought the fish up and onto the pier, where it spun from the hook and caught the eyes of the hungry seabirds and the strolling, curious tourists.
And even though it wasn’t a state or world record—no 11-pound Spanish mackerel (a state record caught in 1983 on Springmaid Pier) nor a 1,780-pound tiger shark (a world record caught in 1964 on the Cherry Grove Pier)—it was a family record, and Will stood there proudly with his catch.
“A croaker,” Maddox said, identifying the species. “Croaks like a pig. Hear it?” The two families gathered around the fish and held their ears to it, startling back when the fish croaked.
“We’ll have to let it go!” Olivia Chamberlain cried. “But I want to touch it!”
Before either of these things could happen, however, Maddox had another idea.
“That’s good eating right there,” he said. “We’ll take it.”
The Chamberlain and Kaiser families looked at each other, as if debating what to do. The fish wasn’t eligible to be entered into the “Fish of the Month” division of the Grand Strand Fishing Rodeo—May is the month for bluefish—and they had originally planned just to throw it back anyway, so they agreed to give the fish to Maddox as a token of their appreciation.
Fishing piers, after all, are places of exchange. They are community gathering sites where, on most days, you can see everyone swapping ideas, advice, stories and occasionally even a fish or two.
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Earl Huggins, visiting from Dallas, N.C., with his son's family, shows off a ribbonfish caught at the Springmaid Pier. |
AT THE SPRINGMAID PIER, MY NEIGHBORS WERE another father-son team, Bruce and Brunson Cook of Union, members of Broad River Electric Cooperative.
“We came down here this morning to get some fishing in before his brother and sister woke up,” Bruce told me as his son Brunson sat beside him and held the rod between his knees. They were accustomed to freshwater ponds in the Upstate, but every year they make a trip to the beach and try their hand at saltwater fishing.
It was a cool spring morning—the tide low and falling, the sun ripening on the horizon—but all anyone seemed to be catching were stories about the past or promises about the future.
“Tuesday we caught some spadefish and some perch,” Bruce Cook said.
“I almost caught a crab this morning!” Brunson Cook chimed in.
Still, the experience was far from dull. There is rarely a dull moment on a Grand Strand fishing pier, as the waiting is almost always interrupted by something in the water—a brood of jellyfish or a shark that glides by as quickly as one of the airplanes overhead. And there is almost always the opportunity to sit back and compose a litany of excuses for why you are not catching any fish—the sharks are scaring them off, the water is too warm, the wind is too strong, the fish aren’t moving like they used to, the bait is wrong, the rig is wrong.
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Get There Apache Campground Pier
9700 Kings Road, Myrtle Beach
(843) 449-7323
Admission: $1 ($2 to park)
Daily fishing pass: $8.50 for two rods
Rod rental: $22
Bait: $4.50 per container
Summer hours: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Cherry Grove Fishing Pier
3500 N. Ocean Blvd., North Myrtle Beach
(843) 249-1625
Admission: $2
Daily fishing pass: $6 per rod
Rod rental: $20 ($13 after 3 p.m.)
Bait: $5.15 per container
Summer hours: 6 a.m. to midnight Myrtle Beach State Par k Fishing Pier
4401 South Kings Hwy., Myrtle Beach
(843) 238-5325
Admission: Free with park pass ($5 per person)
Daily fishing pass: $5 for two rods
Rod rental: $7.50 per rod
Bait: $5 per container
Summer hours: 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. 14th Avenue Pier
1304 N. Ocean Blvd., Myrtle Beach
(843) 448-6500
Admission: $1
Daily fishing pass: $7 per rod
Rod rental: $14
Bait: $5 per container
Summer hours: 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The Pier at Garden City
110 S. Waccamaw Drive, Garden City Beach
(843) 651-9700
Admission: Free
Daily fishing pass: $9 per rod
Rod rental: $9 per rod
Bait: $5 per container
Summer hours: Open 24 hours for fishing 2nd Avenue Pier
110 N. Ocean Blvd., Myrtle Beach
(843) 445-7437
Admission: $1
Daily fishing pass: $9 per person
Rod rental: $25 per package (includes fishing pass, rod and one container of bait)
Bait: $6 per container
Summer hours: 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. Springmaid Pier
3200 Springmaid Blvd., Myrtle Beach
(843) 315-7156
Admission: $1
Fishing pass: $9 per person
Rod rental: $10 per rod
Bait: $5.40 per container
Summer hours: 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. Surfside Pier
11 S. Ocean Blvd., Surfside Beach
(843) 238-0121
Admission: $1
Fishing pass: $9 per person
Rod rental: $9 per rod
Bait: $5.99 per container
Summer hours: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. |
Beside us, Mike Huggins, who was vacationing with his family from Dallas, N.C., looked like he was using the right rig. It was a much longer pole—12 feet long—and he was constantly jigging it up and down, almost like he was keeping time to an unheard melody. It was a strategy I’d seen others successfully using at the end of the pier, where they were bringing up silver, eel-like ribbonfish.
“Most of the time when you catch anything with these, you foul hook it,” he said to me. “But I’ve had real good results with them.”
His rig consisted of nine gold hooks, set eight inches apart, with a sinker weight on the bottom, and he was aiming for Spanish mackerel, who are fooled into thinking that the gold hooks are shiny minnows in the water. There is something nearly primitive about catching a fish on an empty hook without bait, and there have been times when Huggins has caught multiple fish at once. But this particular morning he was only pulling up a few ribbonfish and a few greenbacks that he tossed back into the water.
As insurance, he also kept a standard pier rig beside him, the kind you rent in the tackle shops and the kind that I was using—two shrimp-baited hooks with a pyramid sinker—and he advised me, like the Cooks had, to drop my bait as close as possible to the barnacle-covered pilings.
IT WAS A STRATEGY THAT BEGAN TO WORK FOR THE Cooks, who pulled up a pinfish and playfully bantered with one another.
“I got you beat today!” Bruce Cook boasted.
“No, you just hooked it, and I caught it!” Brunson corrected him.
And then, unbelievably, it was a strategy that worked for me. I felt a “tap-tap” of the rod, and I gently set the hook, cried “Fish on!” and reeled it in.
Doyle’s lessons about patience had paid off. It was my first fish of the year, and even though it wasn’t a fish to frame on the tackle shop walls, nor even a rodeo fish, it was my fish— a pinfish—small and slippery in my hands.
I thought about something that Chester Doyle had told me.
“I’m sure there are better people at it,” he said about fishing. “But no one loves it more.”
So I held the pinfish for a moment.
I smoothed back its dorsal fin, unhooked it and threw it back into the ocean. It was time to open the plastic container of shrimp, bait two more hooks, cast the line back out—and start dreaming of the next catch.