Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Striper action starting to heat up
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Good fishing for trophy striped bass was slow to materialize on Virginia's coast this season, but things are finally rolling.
Between the first of the month and the middle of last week, about 75 stripers meeting the 40-pound qualification minimum have been registered for citations with the Virginia Saltwater Fishing Tournament, bringing the total to 398.
During the same span, the number of citations for released fish climbed from 312 to 358.
By comparison, during the final week of November, typically a great week for trophy striper fishing in the Chesapeake Bay, both totals grew by only a single fish each.
Like so many things, weather was the primary factor.
"Everything is running late because summer decided to stick around through October," said Josh Anderson at Princess Anne Distributing, a tackle shop in Virginia Beach.
With weather so mild through the early fall, water temperatures off the New England coast remained warmer than usual later than usual. Bait fish were late starting their migration down the coast, and that meant the stripers that follow the bait would also be late.
Now there's plenty of bait and the big predators around Virginia.
In addition to good numbers of big stripers, including some monsters over 50 pounds, a lot of big bluefish are also around the lower bay.
In some areas, in fact, fishermen are having to catch a lot of bluefish to turn up a straggling striper or two.
A lot of the best striper action has been on the bayside of the Eastern Shore between the concrete ships and Plantation Light, Anderson said.
In that area most trophy striper hunters are drifting live eels, a technique that's been around for a few years but has exploded in popularity in the past couple of seasons.
"Two Saturdays ago there were probably 300 to 500 boats up there," Anderson said.
In short, while spotting squawking and diving sea birds is one way to locate schools of stripers and blues, the other way is to look for the armada of fishing boats.
Pressure was much lighter this past weekend because of the rough weather.
Anderson said he fished around Cape Henry on Saturday, when only three boats braved rough conditions. He was in a 55-footer.
"We all caught fish," Anderson said. "They were in the 30- to 44-inch range."
In addition to the stripers off Cape Henry and the Eastern Shore, plenty of fish are still scattered along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The fish range from small schoolies to a few horses.
On days when weather cooperates, fishing should stay good in the bay through the end of the year, when the catch-and-keep season closes. After that, most attention will shift to the waters off Virginia Beach, which will likely offer good action well into 2008.
FLW bypasses bay for 2008 striper series
For the past two years, Virginia Beach has hosted the finale for the FLW Striper Series.
That will change in 2008, as the city is not included on the schedule.
Next year's tournaments will be held in Fortescue, N.J., in April, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., in May, New London, Conn., in June, and West Dennis, Mass., in August.
All of the sites except Fortescue were on this year's four-tournament schedule.
In 2006, Virginia Beach was the site of the series championship. However, few of the qualifying teams actually made the trip.
Realizing that many striper fanatics use boats that are impractical for towing, FLW Outdoors modified the series for this year, eliminating the championship and instead offering four separate tournaments.
The season finale in Virginia Beach, held Dec. 8, drew only 36 teams. By comparison, the tournament in New London attracted 71 teams while the other two events both drew 58 entries.
Fishing was pretty good for the teams that did show up to the Virginia Beach event. Only six teams failed to catch a fish that fell within the 28- to 34-inch keeper slot.
The winning team, captained by John L'Heureux of Virginia Beach, had two fish totaling an impressive 35 pounds, 10 ounces.
A team headed by professional bass angler David Dudley of Lynchburg was sixth with a weight of 32 pounds, 10 ounces.
More CWD deer in West Virginia
The West Virginia Division of Natural Resources has confirmed that chronic wasting disease hot spot Hampshire County has produced five additional deer testing positives for the disease.
The five deer were among 1,285 hunter-killed deer tested this hunting season.
A total of 19 CWD-infected deer have now been identified in Hampshire County, where the disease was first confirmed in a road-killed buck in 2005.
Only one hunter-killed deer had previously been found with CWD. The others have been collected by the DNR.
Four of the five most recent deer came from within a designated CWD containment area covering the portion of the county north of U.S. 50. The other was killed outside the area, near Yellow Springs.
Hampshire County borders Virginia, and CWD-afflicted deer have originated just a few miles from the border. Virginia stepped up CWD testing efforts this season, among other things with an intensified collection program in western Frederick County near the West Virginia CWD hot spot.
Tests have so far been negative.
