Collecting trip on the South River and the Great Coharie Creek tributaries to the Black River near Garland NC.
A great day of collecting and interaction with several bystanders started out a bit gloomy As soon as Fritz showed up at my house it began to rain and it looked like it might follow us all day, but as we left Wilmington the rain stopped and the skies stayed overcast. This was good. It suppressed the air temperatures and we enjoyed mid 70’s weather most of the day -- it was a great day to collect!
On the trip was Fritz Rohde, Brian Perkins, Peter Perschbacher, Rick Sanchez, Scott Smith,Randy Pulley and me (Michael Hissom)
I was amazed at the natural beauty of the South River, a tributary to the Black River. We saw huge old cypress trees with knees nearly four feet tall covered in a tough coating of moss formed their own forest under the canopy of cypress as well as water tupelos and many other wetland trees. This gave us an almost mysterious backdrop to the day’s collecting.
I was stoked from the very beginning due to a wonderful apparition caused by the overcast skies and the flat smooth water that caused the quiet pools to look like stainless steel mirrors of the sky and water. The first place we stopped to look was framed by a huge dead cypress tree and a half arched living tree that had fallen over into the water and along with the reflection from the surface of the water made it look like a round portal into another world!
As we moved down to the river bed the mud looked intimidating but we quickly learned it wasn’t as deep as it could have been in such a slow water basin. The water was more or less air temperature and the pressure as my waders allowed me to wade out into the water felt cool on my legs and helped keep the waders from being hot.
The bottom of the stream was fine light brown sand in most places and in the shallows among the vegetation there were darters and mudfish abound. Our efforts with the seine and shocker were less than what we had hoped for although the capture of a mudpuppy made my day! We did catch a large red-breasted sunfish as well as a few dollar sunfish.
We moved to another site on the same river at a wildlife landing and had several interesting conversations with people enjoying the day and the river. The bottom here was mostly sand and gravel and the water flowed a little faster, but we didn’t pick up much in the way of new species at this site other than some tiny gar a redfin pickerel and a chain pickerel.
We saw the head of a flathead catfish was found on the bottom, evidently the result of catching and cleaning the fish on site a day or so before we were there.
The next site was on the Great Coharie Creek just before it joins the Six Runs Creek to Form the Black River. The site had a beautiful cover of Cape Fear Spatterdock, the river bottom was thickly covered by the spatterdock over a large area but the fish population turned out to be elusive but we did harvest some nice plants.
Species list for the day:
· American eel
· Longnose gar
· Golden shiner
· Dusky shiner
· Ironcolor shiner (maybe)
· Comely shiner
· Coastal shiner
· Eastern silvery minnow
· Creek chubsucker
· Spotted sucker
· Channel catfish
· Flathead catfish!!
· Chain pickerel
· Redfin pickerel (maybe)
· Swampfish
· Pirateperch
· Eastern mosquitofish
· Bluespotted sunfish
· Flier
· Redbreast sunfish
· Bluegill
· Dollar sunfish
· Spotted sunfish
· Warmouth
· Largemouth bass
· Banded pygmy sunfish
· Tessellated darter
· Sawcheek darter
· Piedmont darter
NANFA Youtube Channel 
