Thursday, July 13, 2006
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: This isn't your daddy's flounder fishing
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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If you think it costs a bundle to gas up your fishing boat -- and it does -- go figure the cost of bait for your July flounder trip. A live spot, the preferred offering, will set you back about $2 apiece in most tackle shops around the southern end of Eastern Shore and in Virginia Beach. That is, if you can find them.
The demand is so high from flounder and cobia fishermen, chances are that the tackle shop bait tank will be as empty as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. So you catch a mess of spot yourself, but that takes bloodworms, patience and precious fishing time.
It all pays off, however, when you lower your spot to the floor of the Chesapeake Bay and feel it suddenly become nervous because it is eyeball to eyeball with the tooth-filled mouth of a flounder bigger than the hatch on a 30-foot boat.
You dip your rod tip briefly and start counting. “One, two, three …” When the flounder has had time to immobilize your high-dollar bait, spin it around and swallow it, you set the hook. Wham! The fight is on.
This isn’t the flounder fishing that your Daddy taught you. You’d best forget about the old technique of using a 2.5-inch minnow and a 4-inch strip of squid for bait and catching a bunch of throwbacks along with an occasional keeper. Also forget about fishing knee-deep water depths while making long drifts across flats that are as smooth as a baby’s bottom. And never again think of flounder fishing as just a spring fling.
Now is the time to catch jumbo-size flounder in the lower Chesapeake Bay. Here’s the secret:
“If you want to target big fish you use [a large] live bait and you work structure,” said Claude Bain, director of the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament.
Fishermen started doing this a couple years ago and the catch of big flounder has soared. Last year, anglers registered 902 trophy flounder catches in the tournament and 35 releases. Get this: Sixty-five of the catches weighed 10 pounds or more.
“We’ve never had that many flounder over 10 pounds registered in a single year in the [49-year] history of this program,” Bain said.
A couple of things are happening. The flounder population has been on the rebound following a crash about a decade ago, so the fish are getting bigger annually, and anglers are learning to target big fish away from the traditional fishing grounds.
The hot spot is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which offers nearly 18 miles of structure in the form of pilings and underwater tubes carrying traffic between Virginia Beach and the Eastern Shore.
Bain prefers about a 4- to 6-inch spot for bait, but menhaden and croakers will also get the job done. You hook the bait through the lips with a 5/0 hook attached to a three-way swivel bearing a weight just heavy enough to take it to the bottom. The trick is to maintain your line vertically and keep your bait a couple of reel turns off the bottom to avoid snags.
The fishing depths will range from 30 to 75 feet. A bit of a running tide appears to stimulate the feeding of flounder, but too much current can make holding the boat in the proper place a challenge.
It requires good boat handling to stick to the pilings and to work the tubes, so one angler must dedicate full time to that. Some anglers anchor on the up side of the structure and fish it thoroughly, then check another place in about 15 minutes if they haven’t had a hit.
From the surface, the hundreds of pilings tend to look alike. What you are searching for is structure around the bottom of the piling. This might be rocks or rubble of some kind, maybe even a Pepsi truck that has tumbled from the bridge. The bigger the flounder, so it seems, the more important the structure.
“There are 60 or 70 places like that,” Bain said of the good structure spots.
A few anglers will travel as many as 30 miles to an offshore wreck to find trophy flounder.
One good thing about the size of the bait being used, it eliminates getting hooked up with small flounder. “You put a 5-inch, 6-onch spot on the bottom and not many 12-inch flounder are going to maul it,” Bain said. The goal is quality, not quantity.
This season has been productive, and Bain doesn’t look for that to change over the next several weeks. Fact is, he expects a state record catch most any day now.
