Thursday, January 07, 2010
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Deep-freeze temperatures lower prospects of record striper
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Frederick Barnes (third from left) with his 73-pound Virginia record striped bass.
This is the time of year anglers along the coast of Virginia ponder the prospects of catching a state record saltwater striped bass. After all, the current record, 73 pounds, has been in the books for nearly two years.
It fell to Frederick Barnes of Chesapeake, who was aboard a boat trolling a red and white Stretch 30 lure off Fisherman’s Island north of Virginia Beach. The date was Jan. 23, 2008.
Can anyone top it?
No one did in 2009. The leading entry in the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament last year was a hefty 66-pound, 8-ounce catch by Pete Johnson of Hampton who was trolling near Smith Island.
These are huge striped bass, not far off the world record of 78.5 pounds landed in 1982 by Albert McReynolds off Atlantic City, N.J.
You don’t have to look far to run into an angler who will tell you that a Virginia-caught fish will beat that some day.
A few days ago a commercial fisherman stopped at Princess Anne Distributing Co, a popular tackle shop in downtown Virginia Beach, with the story that he watched a striper swim off from his gill net because the head of the fish was way too big to get caught in the mesh. He estimated that the fish weighed 80 pounds.
“There still are a lot of big fish around,” said Claude Bain, who works at Princess Anne Distributing Co., following his retirement as director of the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament.
The big question, are the fishing conditions right to catch one? The frigid weather isn’t helping. It can put the fish deep; it can send them south; it can keep them offshore and it can make them lethargic.
So the chances of taking a record “probably aren’t as good as in past years,” said Bain.
This winter’s fishery has been challenging. “The eel fishing has been poor; not as good as expected,” said Bain. Trolling is the key approach at the moment. Many of the ocean-front stripers have remained beyond the 3-mile mark where fishing is off limits. The most recent citation count shows 2009 striper entries in the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament about half of what they were last year.
But even with recent days of extremely frigid weather, fishermen have docked with limit catches this week. Most are coming from south of Virginia Beach where the water is a tad warmer.
Big on the horizon is this weekend’s 7th annual Mid-Atlantic Rockfish Shootout which is offering a purse of more than $200,000. The results of the contest could determine whether this fishery is about over for the winter or will continue to bow the rods of anglers into late January and early February. Many people envision an early finish.
You get an idea of how outstanding striped bass fishing is in Virginia by reading Tony Checko’s book “The Striped Bass 60+ Pound Club.”
“Today there are about 2 million striped bass anglers seeking this magnificent fish, yet fewer than 100 bass over 60 pounds are know to have been caught by rod and reel and registered since records have been kept,” he writes. “The catch of a 60-pound striped bass is a rare event.”
Barnes’s 73-pound fish was taken too later to get into Checko’s book, which has a 2008 copyright, but had it made the cut it would have been tied for fourth place. A 63-pounder taken Jan. 30, 2004 by Carolyn Brown off Virginia Beach does make the book. It provides hope for cold-water fishermen because it was landed when the water was 39 degrees.
SOME THINGS I PICKED UP from Tony Checko’s “The Striped Bass 60+ Pound Club:”
- Many of the 60-plus pound striped bass catalogued in this book were caught on eels. Eels were catching big stripers 100 years ago; yet, in Virginia they only recently have become a very popular bait. Word is that saltwater anglers learned how to use them from freshwater lake fishermen.
- You might wonder how anyone can land a 60-plus striped bass, considering how hard smaller striper fight. But many of the anglers in Checko’s book say the bigger the bass the less they fight. They compare the jumbo fish to elderly, overweight people.
- Many of the big fish featured in the book nearly escaped at the boat because the angler’s landing net was too small for the job.
- It takes time to grow a big striper. Several of the trophy fish Checko writes about were more than 30 years old.
- While an inexperienced or casual fisherman may occasionally hook a 60-plus pound striper, big fish often are the prize of anglers with experience, skills and knowledge.
