A fishing trip to remember

Matthew Montgomery, president of Montgomery Level Company, will always hold special memories of his stepfather Robert Register, but one in particular will stand out forever.

After Register passed away in October, Montgomery’s mother surprised her son by asking him to “take him out to the ocean, to one of the beaches you go to and spread his ashes.”

Montgomery was more than happy to help his mother.

Along with friends Kenny Barnes, Pat Davis and Bobby Rodgers, Montgomery made a special trip to the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge to hold a small beach service in memory of Register.

They found a spot on an exposed sandbar between Cape Island and Lighthouse Island usually covered at high tide.

“… I dug a hole and put the biodegradable urn in the hole,” Montgomery said.

The urn would soon disintegrate, he said, and the ashes spread.

He then placed in the sand a small plywood cross on which he wrote a short tribute to his stepfather “Drift with the sea.”

After the friends had a short memorial service, they began surf fishing. They soon landed three large redfish, all over South Carolina’s 15- to 23-inch slot limit, and threw them back.

Then Montgomery caught an 18-inch fish and decided to keep it, placing it on a stringer.

“About five minutes later this bald eagle came screaming in,” he said. “It landed on the sand about five feet away from the fish, waddled over and jumped on it.”

The eagle made several attempts to fly away with the fish, but couldn’t because it was on the stringer.

The men were in awe of the large, powerful bird of prey.

“I’ve done a lot of fishing out on those beaches, and every once in a while have seen one flying out in the distance, but none of us never seen one that close — not out in the wild,” he said. “We didn’t know anything about eagles, their demeanor, how close you can get to them, if they’re going to attack you or jump up on you.”

After watching the eagle chow down on the redfish, Montgomery finally eased over and detached the stringer from his sand spike and tried to pull the fish away from the hungry bird. He said the eagle finally relinquished its grip.

“The fish was pretty mangled, so I threw it up on the beach,” Montgomery said.

The eagle took the offering and flew a short distance from the fishermen before settling back down to its meal.

“He sat there for over an hour eating the fish,” Montgomery said. “He consumed the whole fish other than the bones. Shortly after that, he flew off and landed right by the cross. I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’”

Montgomery said he and his friends will never forget that day on the beach remembering his stepfather, the great fishing — and the amazing eagle.