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Recommendations
On December 6, I will unofficially release my book, Chesapeake Light Tackle – A Introduction to Light Tackle Fishing on the Chesapeake Bay. I’m very excited. The challenge, of course, will be selling it. Since many brick and mortar bookstores are closing, and big national chains like Borders are going under, you may be wondering why in the world anyone would want to put words down on real paper pages. I’ve been asking myself that question, especially since it’s a whole lot easier to relay my fishing stories and technique tips via this website. When you think about it, the medium doesn’t really matter too much as long as the information is up-to-date and reliable. So, why a book?
There’s just something about a printed paper book that I like. Even after the invention of electronic books, I still buy the paper kind, especially for non-fiction. I can make notes, underline, highlight, mark my place, and carry a paper book with me anywhere I go. I’m also a collector. I think most fishermen are. We like to gather fishing lures, rods, reels, electronic equipment, magazines, and especially books. I don’t know of a single serious fisherman who doesn’t have a few fishing books and magazines around the house. I like paper books. Read More!
So far, it’s been a disappointing fall for Chesapeake Bay striper fishing. There are a few fish to be caught, but it usually takes a lot of time and fuel dollars to find them. I spent a few minutes last night going over my logs from the past four years. This November’s fishing has been the poorest I’ve seen since I started fishing the Chesapeake. I think there are several reasons, first and foremost is lack of bait. We already know that menhaden have been over-harvested to the point where they are only a small fraction of what they should be, and we know that striped bass populations are down, but I think our biggest problem this fall is fresh water.
Last week, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources reported big problems with Upper Bay oysters. As part of a Bay-wide survey, biologists collected samples from 15 individual oyster bars north of the Bay Bridge. In the four northernmost bars along the Eastern Shore, oysters suffered a cumulative mortality of 79 percent, with no live oysters on the two northernmost bars. The few live oysters that were found in upper Bay bars were in poor condition — bloated, watery and translucent — and mortalities may continue for some time. Biologists believe the high mortality was caused by the lack of salinity in the upper Bay from March through July, 2011. During that period many modern day records were broken for high flow and low salinity. Read More!
A few months ago, if you told me that I would give up the last weekend in October to drive eight hours and go flycasting for false albacore, I would’ve said you’re crazy. This is traditionally one of the best times of the year to catch big striped bass in the Upper Chesapeake Bay. Unfortunately, the stripers aren’t where they usually are, and fishing close to Kent Island has been tough lately. Since a man’s gotta fish, I hit the road.
I got to know Gary Reich last winter at the Fisherman’s Night Out events at Dick Franyo’s Boatyard Bar & Grill in Annapolis. Gary is the editor for PropTalk magazine, one of the co-sponsors of those outings. One snowy evening Gary told me about an annual trip he takes down to Harkers Island, North Carolina. It sounded like fun, and I asked if I could tag along with him next time. I’d forgotten about it until I got a message from him a few weeks ago asking if I was still interested. I only had one day available, a Sunday, but I jumped at the chance. Read More!
Since I’ve reported bigger fish on recent trips, I’ve been overwhelmed with questions from fishermen who want to know where the fish are. The big fish are moving around very quickly and they are rarely at the same place twice. Even on days when I find them right back where I left them, they’ve been very wary and hard to catch. It’s been a challenging season, but if you look at my mid-October fishing reports from last year, you’ll see that the pattern is nearly the same. I think we sometimes put too much emphasis on locations, and not enough on patterns. Tell someone where to go to catch a fish and you may help them for a day, but teach them how to identify specific patterns in how fish behave, and you’ve helped them for a lifetime. Ask any accomplished fisherman the secret to repeated success and he’ll tell you it’s the ability to identify specific feeding patterns. I believe that you can drop a good fisherman into any body of water in the world and he’ll catch fish as long as you give him enough time to recognize the prevailing pattern. It’s especially important on the Chesapeake where circumstances change quickly and rapid drops in water temperature are not unusual in October. I think fishing conditions shift faster and more often here than anywhere I’ve fished before. Fortunately, fish are creatures of habit and there are distinct patterns to their behavior.
The good news is that those migratory fish I talked about last week – you know, the ones that sneak in through the C&D canal every October – well, they’re here. Since last Tuesday, reports of big, clean fish with sea lice have been flooding in. The bad news is that the Upper Chesapeake Bay is still so murky that those big stripers are moving quickly down the channel searching for cleaner water and more plentiful bait fish. They haven’t gone too far south, but they have bypassed the northern humps and ledges where we’ve found them in years past. The ugly part is that, since those fish showed up in some very accessible high-traffic areas, word got out quickly and a bite that traditionally lasts until the end of October shut down in just a few days. At the end of last week, fishing was very good, but soon hoards of inexperienced fishermen, some with screaming kids, running engines, and blaring radios, descended on an area that is shorter and narrower than a football field. That caused the fish to hunker down and become very difficult to catch. Difficult, but not impossible. It’s been a tough week, but there are trophy stripers in our area right now, and fishing is sure to improve as more and more migratory fish enter the Chesapeake.
There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been! ~Percy Bysshe Shelley
Is there anything more dramatic than an October sky? If I had my way there would be an eternal high tide, a full moon every night, and the skies would always glow like they do in Autumn. There’s a chill in the Chesapeake air tonight, signaling that fall is here and October fishing has begun. Just like they have the past three years in a row, bigger fish have arrived in the shallows of the mid and upper Bay. The pattern hasn’t changed from last week: topwater plugs in the shallows are still producing, but the exciting difference is that now there are significantly more 30-inch rockfish in the mix. Nothing beats big stripers exploding on surface plugs beneath the technicolor skies of October. Read More!
