Bill Cochran

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Claude Bain said we probably would have to tie 8 ounces of weight on the terminal end of our 12-foot surf outfits. That is much more lead than I prefer, or can cast with reasonable skill. It reminds me of trying to hit a 3 iron in golf.

Bain, an accomplished surf fisherman and golfer, didn’t like it all that well, either, but he figured a half-pound of weight may be necessary to hold our baits in the Cobb Island surf, where a wind had ruffled the water for several days.

We were after red drum, or channel bass, and Bain had received a promising report of action in the Cobb surf. So prior to dawn, I caught up with Mark Taylor, outdoor editor of the Roanoke Times, Bill Hall, one of the big-name saltwater angler of Virginia, and Bain, the former director of the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament.

I told Taylor he was lucky to be fishing with three of the best anglers in the state. “Claude Bain, Bill Hall, and who is the third one?” he asked.

The outing was a test for Bain. His last day as tournament director, a position he held for 20 years, was Aug. 31. We had wondered, would he quit fishing when his job ended? Was angling just something he did because it was part of his work, or was it something he enjoyed? Would his old fishing buddies be forgotten?

We got our answer. When Bain met for the Cobb Island outing, he’d already been fishing twice that week. The big difference: he no longer can tell his wife he is going to work when he goes out the door with a fishing rod.

Cobb is a flat, sandy finger of land, one of a string of wild and remote barrier islands that stretch some 75 miles along Virginia’s Eastern Shore, from Maryland to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Only about 4 miles long, Cobb looked like a pencil mark etched on the horizon as we left Willis Wharf and headed southeast in Hall’s 21-foot Contender.

The day’s first rays of sun were bathing this stark and beautiful setting in breathtaking pastel colors, and we were taking in visual gulps of it. But we also had to press our faces into the depth finder in an effort to locate a channel in the ever changing and often shallow water that runs from the mainland to the islands. This is one of the reasons you seldom see another person on the islands. There are no four-wheel drives, sun bathers, surf boarders, fast-food joints, miniature golf or tie-dye shops. It's just a merging of sand, surf, sea, sky and seclusion.

It wasn’t always that way, the seclusion part. In the mid-1800s, Nathan Cobb and his family bought the island, reportedly for 100 bags of salt they had boiled out. Word of the outstanding fishing and duck hunting they enjoyed soon spread and the Cobbs became guides and built hotels to accommodate their guests, many whom were rich and famous. At the center of the community was a life saving station.

Islanders had to cope with the storms that ripped across the Atlantic, but a hurricane in 1933 was so fierce that it sent inhabitants running, toppled buildings into the sea and turned villages into battered ghost towns. The point hammered home was that Cobb was no place for people to inhabit. The Nature Conservancy now owns it, preserving it for wildlife and an occasional surf fisherman. Man’s marks pretty well have been erased by sand, sea and time.

October visitors nowadays are migratory birds and red drum that move along the sloughs that parallel the beach, along with an occasional adventurous surf fisherman stalking inshore big game.

The barrier islands provide some of the best fishing for trophy red drum in the world. But not this day. We were able to hold our baits with 6- and 7-ounces of lead, but they attracted not a single copper-hewed bass.

Our catch of the day simply was being a fleeting visitor in a place where history has traveled in reverse and nature has reclaimed its own. The tide would erase our tracks, as it did those of the Cobb family, and it would be as if we were never there, except in memory.