Monster Flounder

October, 2014. South Topsail Island, North Carolina. One of those surprisingly crisp, early fall evenings, where the unexpected coolness both takes you by surprise, and gets amplified tenfold by the breeze coming off of the water. It got cold enough that i could see the vapor in my breath. There I was in thin summer shorts, with only a t-shirt and a thin hoodie to protect from the cutting 45° breeze that in my mind felt like -10. That was my first night of flounder gigging with ‘the’ Frank File. Frank in these parts is known as the man, the myth, the flounder-gigging-legend. Frank is one of those go-get-em type guys who has stabbed more fish in his lifetime than most normal men could dream of. He has gigged copious stringers of flounder in every type of inclement weather, risking life, limb, and a few fishing companions’ safety, to go stubbornly after what he considers to be the inshore’s tastiest fish. That night was the first with the gig in my hand. Frank armed me and a few other guys from church each with a rusty gig and a battery-powered wading light, and then with a minimum of casually-uttered points of instruction, set us on our way.

Buddied up with my friend Brandon (him with the light, me with the gig) we shuffled along through chilly knee-deep water near the south end of the island, scoping for flounder-shaped quarry buried in the sand. We walked along while confessing to one another that we probably wouldn’t know what a flounder even looked like if we were to run across one. And how would we even see it if it is buried in the sand? We waded along expectantly, hoping to see something stab-worthy. After an uneventful hour, Brandon and I lifted up our eyes to see a flounder-shaped obstacle about 20 feet in front of us. We had no frame of reference as to what a ‘giggable’ flounder would look like, but at first glance it seemed like it would fit the bill. Was it 14 inches long? This thing looked to be the size of a small sofa. We waded up to it, studied it for a moment, and then Brandon allowed that I should be the one to stab it. I already had the gig in hand, and after all, he did not have any experience gigging flounder. Truth be told, neither did I, but I went for it and crushed that mammoth flattie right through the gill plates with a Poseidon-like five-pronged gig that looked like something left over from filming ‘Moby Dick.’ The huge fish flopped and thrashed and when we finally hoisted it out of the water we mutually allowed that it was a ‘pretty decent fish’ and that our mentor, Frank, might find it acceptable. We hollered at Frank to get his attention and when we showed him the fish his eyes about popped out of his head. In all his gigging years, which Frank has experienced many, he had only ever before seen one other behemoth similar to this magnitude and girth. After hot showers, and a few hours’ sleep, we took it up to the Topsail beach fishing pier where they had a set of certified scales, where it weighed in at 9 pounds, 9.5 ounces, and measured 28 inches long. The fillets rolled off of that fish as big as sirloin steaks. First fish gigged for me was a monster. I have never seen a live one that big since, although many similarly-sized fatties continue to populate the dreams of all of us who witnessed the beast that night.