Sunday, July 20, 2008
Fishing refuge minutes from city
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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RICHMOND -- They are the scores that make you cringe, the tallies so lopsided and ugly that all but the most cold-hearted fans of the winner can't help but feel a little guilty.
Finals such as: Texas Rangers 30, Baltimore Orioles 3.
LSU 48, Virginia Tech 7.
Fred Leckie 40, Mark Taylor 4.
Hadn't heard that last one? You have now.
The bass fishing beat down took place Tuesday afternoon in the shadow of Richmond on the James River, the third destination on the eight-stop Summer Smallmouth Tour I'm taking to explore some of the interesting places, people and issues of smallmouth bass fishing in Virginia.
The score might not be entirely accurate. Leckie didn't actually count how many fish he caught. The 40 was just a guess, and probably a conservative one.
Of course when you catch only four, it's pretty hard to lose count.
Excuses?
Well, this is Leckie's home water, and there are advantages to knowing the pockets and slots that always seem to hold the fish.
Leckie also didn't have to spend time taking pictures, shooting video and scribbling notes.
But those excuses are weak. I fished a lot and caught little.
At least it should make Virginia's fishermen feel pretty good.
They should be glad that one of the senior managers in the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries isn't content to manage only from behind his desk.
And not only does Leckie love getting out there on the river, he doesn't have any secrets. He's more than happy to tell you where he's catching them and what he's catching them on.
After all, it's his job to get more people out there fishing.
Leckie, 56, is the assistant director for management operations in the Fisheries Division. In short, he supervises the team of biologists working to make the most of Virginia's freshwater fishing resources.
Leckie learned to love smallmouth while spending lots of time in the family's cabin on the banks of West Virginia's Greenbrier River.
After a stint with the fisheries arm of West Virginia Division of Natural Resources, Leckie came to Richmond and the DGIF in 1990. He has been learning Virginia's fishing waters ever since, while still making time for frequent trips back to that cabin on the Greenbrier.
One of Leckie's favorite fisheries is this stretch of the James, a spot that's about midway between the DGIF's downtown headquarters and Leckie's home in Midlothian.
This is part of what locals call the fall-line section, a 9-mile rocky run that separates the freshwater James from the tidal James.
The top of the section is marked by Bosher's Dam, which is about a 30-minute upstream paddle from the Huguenot Flatwater canoe access.
Leckie likes this spot not only because the fishing is pretty good, but the dam is the site of a success story for the department.
In 1999, the agency oversaw construction of fish passage on the north side of the dam, and now anadromous fish such as shad can breach the dam and swim as far upstream as Lynchburg. The agency's Shad Cam allows Internet surfers to watch the underwater action during the migration seasons.
After the upstream paddle, we pulled the canoe up on rocks and Leckie got ready with his secret lure, which we've already established is not really a secret.
It's called an A.C. Shiner, and it's a hand-carved balsa minnow plug that's made in Ohio. It looks a lot like a Rapala.
"But I just like the action better," Leckie said.
He's converted plenty of his fishing buddies, and every spring they pool their cash and buy about $1,000 worth of the lures, which retail for about $10 each.
Part of the shiner's erratic action comes from Leckie, who twitches the tip of his fishing rod during his speedy retrieves to give the plug a darting action.
"Some of the guys call it the Leckie Lurch," he said of the retrieve.
On his first cast he hooked a plump 10-inch bass. A few casts later he was into another one. And that's how it went for three hours.
Most of Leckie's bass where 6- to 8-inchers, which should bode well for the fishery in the next few years. His best was a solid 112-pounder.
When I traded camera gear for fishing gear, a root beer-colored Northland Slurpie Tube produced a stout 10-inch bass on an early cast, but then it went dry. Not even an A.C. Shiner worked.
It took an hour for me to hook a second fish, and it turned out to be a 12-inch catfish that I'd foul-hooked behind the dorsal fin.
There was no complaining about the setting, surprisingly wild despite being just minutes from downtown Richmond.
The roar of the water pouring over the dam covered up the sound of traffic on the Chippenham Park Bridge, and shoreline trees shielded any views of downtown Richmond's nearby metropolitan skyline.
At modest flows, the area below the dam is easily wadable and is big enough to provide for at least a couple hours of fishing.
Many of the recreationists in this reach are just out for fun in their kayaks and canoes. Even on a Tuesday evening the river was full of paddlers in bright-colored boats.
Leckie said the spot below the dam does get a fair amount of fishing pressure, although we had it to ourselves on this afternoon.
"On Saturday, there was a guy out here fishing in front of me," Leckie said. "He did pretty well fishing a grub."
Leckie was happy to see it.
