Friday, August 03, 2007
Monsters of the Bay
With a boat and some basic know-how, even do-it-yourself anglers can catch...
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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VIRGINIA BEACH -- Steve Wray had every reason to roll his eyes as the customer peppered him with basic questions.
Instead, the co-owner of Long Bay Pointe Bait and Tackle courteously responded to each query.
After all, Wray is used to trying to help clueless customers -- in this case, me -- unlock the secrets of the Chesapeake Bay and its roster of coveted game fish.
On this Saturday my buddy Kraig Cesar and I planned to target cobia, big, strong fish that can be found roaming around shoals in the lower bay throughout the summer.
Primed with advice, we loaded Kraig's boat with our bait and tackle and headed toward the Inner Middle Ground Shoal, along with my brother-in-law, Henry Whelchel, and his and Kraig's friend, Tiffany Hansen.
The bay was a little bumpy but it didn't take us long to reach the shoal on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, about midway between the fourth island and the high-rise bridge.
We dropped anchor in about 14 feet of water, drifting with the current into slightly shallower water as the anchor took hold.
Step one in cobia fishing is to get the chum working, so we tied up the 4-gallon mesh bag of ground up fish and dropped it off the stern. Some cobia experts recommend weighting the chum bag to get it closer to the bottom, but we let ours wave in the current on the surface.
Next I started adding chunks of menhaden to the chum slick. Every 10 minutes I would cut up a half-dozen of the oily fish and drop the chunks overboard.
Our primary fishing method would be to use fish-finder rigs (see figure at far right), which use a single hook with the weight on a slider so a fish feels minimal pressure while moving off with a bait.
Our hooks were 8/0 Gamakatsu Octopus hooks, which I tied with a snell knot to 5 feet of 50-pound leader. Four ounces of weight was sufficient to keep our chunks of cut menhaden and live eel baits in place on the bottom.
Then came the hardest part of this type of fishing: waiting.
Actually, in July there typically isn't a lot of idle time because bait-stealers such as crabs and bluefish keep you busy rebaiting hooks.
It didn't take long for us to start catching fish, but they were small bluefish, dogfish and clearnose skates.
But when something strong hammered a chunk of menhaden before I'd even put the rod in the holder, I could tell it had some size. Was it a big ray, another common bay catch? Or a cobia?
After 15 minutes of fighting the fish on baitcasting outfit loaded with 20-pound-test, the fish was finally close enough to the boat to confirm that it was a cobia. After another 10 minutes Kraig was able to gaff the fish and pull it into the boat.
At 38 pounds, it was hardly the kind of trophy the bay is capable of producing -- the state record is 109 pounds, and 70 pounders are fairly common -- but it was plenty big enough to make us happy and make a lot of steaks for the grill.
Thirty minutes later we were into another big fish, this one ripping line from Kraig's heavy spinning outfit.
The fight took even longer, but when the fish was finally close to the boat we could see that it was a large ray, with a wing span of at least 4 feet.
Rays may not be desirable as sport fish, but there's nothing wrong with their fight.
By the time we released the ray and set up for more fishing, the bluefish were thick in our chum slick and it was becoming difficult to keep a bait in the water for more than a couple of minutes.
After the tip of one rod bounced I reeled in to find the eel nipped cleanly in half. We were running low on eels so I just pitched the thing back out.
Something smashed it immediately.
This was another good fish, but what was it?
It seemed I might not find out as the fish took off. The run wasn't blisteringly fast, it just wouldn't end. I watched as line peeled off my reel until the spool was covered with just one layer of monofilament -- maybe 10 yards.
I was about to get spooled for the first time in my life.
My only option was to jam my thumb on the spool, hope the line would hold and the fish would stop.
It worked. Slowly I was able to regain line until, after 20 minutes, I had the fish just off the stern.
It wasn't a cobia or a ray.
It was a red drum, one so fat I at first thought it was a black drum.
The catch was surprising. The shoal is a good drum fishing spot but they typically hit better during low light, not at midday. Furthermore, drum fishing has slowed down in recent weeks.
Kraig scooped the thing into the net and we both strained to lift it over the stern. Quickly we measured the fish, confirming that, at 48-inches, it was big enough for a citation. After a few pictures we released the fish, by far the largest red drum I have ever caught.
We fished for a while longer but soon ran out of bait, and the current was waning anyway.
Although we had planned to target spadefish when the tide went slack, we decided to head in.
For expert cobia and drum anglers, it would have been just an OK day. But for a crew of relative rookies, we couldn't have been happier.
