Sunday, December 04, 2005
Fishing all about the challenge
Mark Taylor is outdoors editor at The Roanoke Times.
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The Wild Life blog
VIRGINIA BEACH -- The Chesapeake Bay can spoil you during striper season.
On many nights, and on a few days, I've caught striped bass on nearly every cast.
Those are the kinds of days fishermen dream about. But it's funny how when they finally happen the fun quickly gets old.
After all, part of the allure of fishing is the challenge. When there is no challenge, we usually go looking for one.
On the day after Thanksgiving, I didn't have to look hard to find tough fishing.
I had trailered my aluminum jon boat down to Virginia Beach where we were spending the holiday weekend with my wife's family.
The boat is not suitable for fishing the best striper area in the bay -- the pilings and rock islands along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel -- but it's fine for fishing smaller water in the lower bay.
One of those areas is Lynnhaven Inlet.
The pilings of the bridge that crosses the inlet don't attract the numbers of stripers, or size of fish that converge on the bridges and bridge tunnels in the main bay. But the area can offer pretty good fishing for smallish fish, and it can produce an occasional hog, such as the 20-pounder I once saw a stunned surf caster pull onto the beach.
The outgoing tide always has produced the best action for me in the area, presumably because stripers stack up in the neck of the inlet to ambush bait fish being swept out into the main bay.
When my friend Kraig Cesar and I headed out the night after Thanksgiving, I thought we were hitting it right. The outgoing tide was rolling and, best of all, no other small boats were fishing the area.
Yet the action was remarkably slow. In three hours we managed just two stripers, and neither came close to the 18-inch minimum size.
Again, I don't mind it when the fishing is somewhat tough, but that was a little too tough. Thinking we got started a little late in the tide, we got an earlier start the next evening.
The sun was just setting as we motored out toward the bridge from the public ramp on the west side of the inlet. The tide was dead high. We anchored in the still water and waited for the current to get rolling.
Another fisherman in a small aluminum boat had the same idea. He was just kicking back in his seat, not even bothering to fish while he waited. Kraig and I couldn't sit there, so we started casting.
And we started hooking small stripers.
When you can catch them on a slack tide, that's a good sign.
Sure enough, when the current started moving the fishing got better.
The stripers were like clones, all about 16 inches long. We were catching enough of them that soon we started hoping to hook into something bigger.
Kraig was the first to do it.
"This is a better fish," he said, raring back on his spinning rod.
The reel's drag squealed, but not for long. The fish got into the pilings and broke off.
A while later I hooked into a strong fish. By then the current was hauling, rolling through the inlet as swift as a fast-moving river.
The fish was hunkered in the current and I couldn't move it. I knew if I horsed the thing I would snap my 8-pound-test monofilament.
Ten minutes later I finally had the fish boatside. It weighed maybe 5 pounds, the kind of fish that usually takes about 90 seconds to boat on the stout tackle most bridge-tunnel fishermen use.
Clearly, I would be in trouble if I hooked anything bigger.
So I put down the spinning rod and went to a heavier casting rod designed for muskie fishing.
It's a good thing because even with that stouter tackle I had my hands full with the next fish, a 24-inch striper that was as fat as football and weighed maybe 7 pounds.
The next one was bigger yet. It fought so hard I kept wondering if someone on a nearby boat was hooked into the same fish and we were fighting each other.
Finally we netted the fish, which was just 26 inches long but so fat it was pushing 10 pounds.
I've caught many larger stripers, but never had a better fight than I got from that fish -- or the two before it.
With three fish in the cooler, that striper could have ended our night. But after taking a couple of pictures I dropped it back into the water.
We weren't ready for this night to end.
