Spring arrived, and Capt. Alan Neiford was pumped. With the summer tournament season ahead, he was overseeing finishing touches on the new Mister Pete, a gorgeous 60-foot Spencer bound for home port in Charleston, South Carolina.
“We’re doing everything we can to make this thing a fishing machine,” Neiford says with enthusiasm. “We’re going to charge pretty hard this year to try to win some money, win some tournaments and make the bosses happy.”
In 15 seasons of running Mister Pete for owners and brothers Rusty and Bob McClam, Neiford has seen the highs and lows of the South Carolina tournament scene. Among his team’s victories is a first place in the 2018 South Carolina Governor’s Cup Billfishing Series. Through five tournaments, the team released nine blue marlin and 12 sailfish to earn Outstanding Billfish Boat.
“The fish were following us around everywhere we went,” he says of the 2018 season. “We had a hell of a season, saw a lot of fish, caught a lot of fish. I’ve been trying to replicate it ever since.”
The thing is, the 2018 numbers were skimpy compared to what teams achieved last season. In 2024, the first-place Outstanding Billfish Boat Buddy Rowe released 11 blue marlin and 37 sailfish. The hot bite was evident across the leaderboards. Last summer, 106 unique boats (many fished several events) competed in the five-leg Governor’s Cup and crushed catch records with 423 billfish. That’s 116 blue marlin, 300 sailfish, six white marlin and one spearfish released.
Neiford called 2024 phenomenal and was optimistic about this summer. He says a good bite in the Bahamas correlates to good fishing off South Carolina. “The fishing is already pretty good there, so that should translate to good fishing for us as well,” he says. “We’ve got a pretty good staging area off Charleston. The flats hold a lot of bait, either on the 100 fathom or just inshore of it. And then you have the introduction of the artificial reefs out there that hold a lot of bait too. That has certainly helped the fishing.”
“Buzz and Energy”
Whether or not last season’s success rates hold up, the South Carolina fishing scene is gaining momentum. Some industry heavy hitters have set up camp in and around Charleston. Shimano North America Fishing opened a headquarters in nearby Ladson, South Carolina, in 2018, and Pure Fishing—with renowned brands like Penn, Abu Garcia and Berkley—unveiled an awesome downtown showroom in May of this year.
Mike Able feels the fishy side of the city humming. He and his brother Graham run Haddrell’s Point Tackle and Supply. Their operations have grown from one storefront when their father opened shop in 1983 to two locations and a fly shop. They opened the year with a fishing expo in Mount Pleasant, just across the Cooper River Bridge from Charleston proper.
“We did a fishing expo in January,” he says. “And I tell ya’ man, there was a buzz and energy. For the first two hours of the show, we had 700 people come through the door. You could just tell everybody was excited for the upcoming season.”
Along with the draw of Lowcountry food and culture, Charleston has long been an inshore fishing destination. However, the offshore fishery was the realm of sport-fishers. In recent years, with advancing capabilities of smaller boats, Able sees increasing interest offshore, where wahoo, sailfish and mahi are targets almost year-round when -weather allows.
Haddrell’s Point hosts an offshore 101 seminar, an introduction to everything from safety and weather patterns to rigging baits and deploying spreads. The event is well attended enough that Able saw demand for on-the-water courses this summer.
Able personally fishes a 34 Regulator and was looking forward to blue marlin returning in May, behind some of the local sporties that migrate back to town each year from tropical winter fisheries. He was thinking of entering the June Carolina Billfish Classic, which is the only Governor’s Cup leg with an outboard-only division. He’s got a decent track record with sails and marlin from his center-console but knows he can’t compete with the big customs.
“A Surge of New Boats”
The traditional base of boats from North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia is facing new competition this summer. Amy Dukes, program director for the Governor’s Cup, is seeing more interest from traveling teams.
“We have definitely seen a surge of new boats coming in, including a couple of boats with big-time names that haven’t fished with us,” she says. “But when you’ve got this hot bite off our coast, it definitely makes some people’s eyeballs get big.”
The series has been a staple for regional boats, with a tight-knit core of local teams since it was founded by then Gov. Carroll Campbell in 1989. Dukes says that along with promotion of the fishery, conservation was a big part of Campbell’s vision when he entrusted operations to South Carolina’s Department of Natural Resources. Dukes says the series has created one of the most robust billfish data sets on the Eastern Seaboard.
“Conservation for this particular group of species has absolutely been on the incline for the entire 2000s, and with primarily a catch-and-release fishery, conservation messages have absolutely had a positive impact on the population sizes of these fish,” she says. It’s part of the reason for the booming fishery.
Another reason is the increased participation. More tournaments and boats equate to more fish caught. In 2024, the Governor’s Cup went back to a five-tournament schedule for the first time since 2018. It hit a low point during COVID-wracked 2020, when the only event held was the Carolina Billfish Classic.
This year, the series is chugging at full steam, with five legs that opened with The Charleston Billfish Invitational May 7-10 and will close with the Edisto Invitational Billfish Tournament July 16-19. The tournaments are spread in a roughly 100-mile swath of coast, from the venerable 57-year-old Georgetown Blue Marlin Tournament north of Charleston to the season ender at Edisto Island to the south.
Everyone is hoping to see similar conditions to last year, when warm eddies swirling off the Gulf Stream 50 to 75 miles offshore concentrated bait and billfish. The blue marlin show up first, sometimes before the mahi, says Neiford. Then, later in the season, boats return to the dock streaming sailfish flags like carnival pennants.
“If you have a really good eddy that sticks around for a while with a good down tide, that’s usually when we have our good fishing, when the bait can stick around for three, four, five, six days or sometimes even a week,” Neiford says. “Luckily, with the way the bottom is out there, we’ll get some good eddies, and that always turns -into good fishing.”
“Dialed In”
Like everywhere else, technology removes some of the guesswork from finding fish. Neiford says a big advantage to sonar is eliminating water. If you arrive at the fishy-looking area in the plan and aren’t marking fish, you move on. He says it also helps a lot for picking up numbers. Mark two or three fish and hook one? You should probably make a few more passes.
“Eight to 10 years ago, if 50 percent of the boats had sonar, that would have probably been a high number,” Able says. “You look at it the last couple of years, and it’s probably 75 or 80 percent of those tournament boats have sonar nowadays.”
Starlink and the availability of offshore internet bring real-time information to decision–making on the water. But despite rapidly advancing technology, good fishermen who work well together are still the teams winning tournaments.
“Some of these teams just have it dialed in. One of the guys I fished with yesterday is Cordes Johnson, and he fished on the Buddy Rowe all last year. He made it on that boat, and I think they were swinging something like 90 percent throughout the entire tournament series,” Able says. “You’ve got these guys that fish as a team consistently and that are doing a really good job hooking fish. It’s hard to beat that.”
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“Giant Family Reunion”
Even with the beautiful boats, next-level technology and fierce competition, camaraderie is the theme that consistently rises to the surface on the South Carolina tournament scene.
Dukes calls it family-friendly: “It’s like a giant family reunion. They bring their wives and kids, and the docks are filled. And they keep coming back to participate every year.”
Able goes to the docks for knowledge: “A lot of these people have been fishing beside each other for a long time. It’s a community of skilled anglers, and when you talk with them, you’re either laughing or learning.”
