Poor weather on the original tournament date of Nov. 1 may have postponed the flounder fishing frenzy that is the Flat Bottom Girls Flounder Tournament, but it did not kill it. Set for Saturday, Nov. 8, flounder fishermen will take to the waters of the Cape Fear region all in the name of science and flounder.
In what will be the 11th year of the tournament, event organizer and flounder enthusiast Tim Barefoot said all flounder caught will be kept alive and transported to the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science for research.
“I was a flounder-aholic years ago and noticed around 1999 or 2000 that my big girls started going away and I wasn’t catching the big ones at the rate I wanted,” Barefoot said. “I started talking to some friends in commercial fishing and some that were good flounder fishermen and they all thought the same thing I was thinking.”
Barefoot said the native Southern flounder population has been considered depleted by the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries for years. While the reproductive process for Southern flounder naturally yields few fish that will grow into adulthood out of thousands of spawn, the numbers have suffered more with an explosion in the pinfish population. The pinfish population has grown due to the increased catch of its predators like bluefish, trout, red drum, grouper and cobia.
In the hands of scientists at UNCW Center for Marine Science, like Dr. Wade Watanabe, the mature flounder caught during the Flat Bottom Girls tournament will become the parents of a brood stock of baby flounder that will be transported to places across the country.
The acceptance of large-scale stock enhancement of Southern flounder in North Carolina is one of Barefoot’s goals and one of the goals of the tournament.
“We are trying to show we have the ability to create healthy, disease-free fish and we have the ability to release them into the creeks where they need to be at the optimal size of about 3 inches,” he said. “We could make North Carolina the flounder capital of the world.”
The captain’s meeting for the tournament will take place Friday, Nov. 7, at Dockside Restaurant. Fishing begins at sunrise Saturday, Nov. 8, with a weigh-in at Dockside Marina by 5 p.m.
For more information and to join the tournament, phone Barefoot at 910-264-9118.
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