We’ve enjoyed a pretty good spring of light-tackle fishing on the Chesapeake Bay.  Water temperatures warmed early, then leveled off through the end of April into May.  Top-water casting is good right now at some places.  Some anglers are even sight-casting surface lures and flies to cruising fish on shallow oyster bars near the mouths of the rivers.  The water in some parts of the Upper Bay is clearer than I’ve ever seen it.  While that makes surface fishing enjoyable, it also makes jigging tough since it’s easier for stripers to distinguish the difference between our lures and baitfish. The clear water looks nice,  but there’s a big problem lurking below the surface: Low dissolved oxygen (DO).  Measured in milligrams per litre, dissolved oxygen levels were recorded at 1.04 on the bottom beneath the Bay Bridge in April.  That’s lower than they’ve been in twenty-five years. Look out for big algae blooms coming soon. Salinity also peaked to record levels in April.  Last spring, Bay Bridge salinity was 4.20 ppt.  This year, it’s more than twice that at 10.50 ppt.  DO levels are also low in Eastern Bay, although salinity there is closer to normal.  What does this mean for the fishing?  Read More!

The third in a series of entries about the senses striped bass use to find their prey, here’s a look at how we can trigger more strikes by understanding how stripers hear and feel. It’s no secret that fish can be either attracted or repelled by sound. One of the biggest mistakes I see from rookie Chesapeake Bay fishermen is making too much noise. Every hunter knows the importance of stealth. When I was a kid, my dad taught me to walk lightly in the woods and to avoid stepping on sticks or limbs that might crack.  He also showed me how to control a cough or sneeze and advised me to regulate my breathing in order to be more stealthy.  Later, I sat through U. S. Army basic training and NCO academy classes stressing the importance of noise discipline in combat. Avoiding excessive noise when you’re fishing seems like common sense, but I’m always amazed when I see a boatload of fishermen roar up on a fishing spot, laughing and shouting with radio blaring and engine running.

Obviously, stripers can be put off by noise, but they can be attracted by the sounds they’ve learned to associate with food.  To a casual observer, it might seem like a quiet world beneath the water, but it’s really a noisy environment: Drumfish drum, croakers croak, baitfish bolt, crustaceans click, even crawling crabs contribute to the convoluted cacophony of sound. Striped bass hear low-pitched subaquatic sounds better than humans.  They have an auditory range that starts on the low end at 15 sound waves per second (Hz) and tops out on the high side at about 15,000 Hz.  Humans can’t hear sounds much lower than 20 Hz, but we can usually hear high pitched sounds better than rockfish.  The angler’s challenge is to amplify the sounds that trigger strikes, while masking the ones that send fish packing. Read More!

If the next 51 weeks of 2012 go as well as the first one, this promises to be a very good year for light tackle fishing on the Chesapeake Bay. I’ve fished four times and caught a Diamond Jim qualifying citation fish on each trip including three rockfish in the mid 40-inch range. I’m chalking it up to a little experience, some insider information, and a lot of luck.  My son, “Big Fish Cory” has been visiting. Although he didn’t catch any trophies this time around, he still brought along his lucky horseshoe.  Chesapeake striped bass fishermen have two basic winter options.  One is to fish deep holes – either in the main stem of the Bay or up in the outside bends of the rivers – and the other is to work the warm water discharges. Since we’ve had a very mild winter so far, the warm water discharges have been inconsistent.  I decided to split the difference and fish the last four days close to home off Kent Island.

One of the best places I know of to jig up deep water rockfish is the Bay Bridge.  Two- and three-year-old-stripers and white perch survive the cold winter by stacking up around the Bay Bridge rock piles. They’ll stay there until the spring freshet washes out their warm water comfort zones. Even though they are readily apparent on a fish finder, they aren’t always easy to catch. To coax a strike out of deep-water stripers you just have to aggravate them until they bite.  You can jig for hours and not get a single strike, then, snap – the fish will turn on and you’re catching every cast. Read More!

I’ve just spent an extra long, extra fun weekend at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (CBBT). Connecting the Delmarva Peninsula with Norfolk and Virginia Beach, the CBBT is 23 miles of high-current structure that is prime habitat for striped bass. Rich Jenkins and I trailered my Judge 27 center console Thunder Road down Rt 13 to Cape Charles late last Friday.  My son Daniel and my brother-in-law Mitch flew into Norfolk to meet us. We had a great time and found some fine fishing.

In Decembers past I’ve stayed at hotels in the Kiptopeke area but this time I decided to look into renting a vacation home for our four night stay.  After calling and emailing several places, I settled on a house in historic Cape Charles called “Southern Comfort on the Bay.”  A recently remodeled Victorian with three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen, game room, washer and dryer and a driveway large enough to park my boat in, it was the perfect base for our five days of fishing.  It’s very nice to come off the water and have a roomy place to kick back, dry our clothes, watch football, play cards, and enjoy good food and drink. Better still was the price.  I’ve paid more for a single hotel room. Read More!

So far, it’s been a disappointing fall for Chesapeake Bay striper fishing.  There are a few fish to be caught, but it usually takes a lot of time and fuel dollars to find them.  I spent a few minutes last night going over my logs from the past four years.  This November’s fishing has been the poorest I’ve seen since I started fishing the Chesapeake.  I think there are several reasons, first and foremost is lack of bait.  We already know that menhaden have been over-harvested to the point where they are only a small fraction of what they should be, and we know that striped bass populations are down, but I think our biggest problem this fall is fresh water.

Last week, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources reported big problems with Upper Bay oysters. As part of a Bay-wide survey, biologists collected samples from 15 individual oyster bars north of the Bay Bridge. In the four northernmost bars along the Eastern Shore, oysters suffered a cumulative mortality of 79 percent, with no live oysters on the two northernmost bars. The few live oysters that were found in upper Bay bars were in poor condition — bloated, watery and translucent — and mortalities may continue for some time.   Biologists believe the high mortality was caused by the lack of salinity in the upper Bay from March through July, 2011.  During that period many  modern day records were broken for high flow and low salinity.  Read More!

Since I’ve reported bigger fish on recent trips, I’ve been overwhelmed with questions from fishermen who want to know where the fish are. The big fish are moving around very quickly and they are rarely at the same place twice. Even on days when I find them right back where I left them, they’ve been very wary and hard to catch. It’s been a challenging season, but if you look at my mid-October fishing reports from last year, you’ll see that the pattern is nearly the same.  I think we sometimes put too much emphasis on locations, and not enough on patterns. Tell someone where to go to catch a fish and you may help them for a day, but teach them how to identify specific patterns in how fish behave, and you’ve helped them for a lifetime. Ask any accomplished fisherman the secret to repeated success and he’ll tell you it’s the ability to identify specific feeding patterns. I believe that you can drop a good fisherman into any body of water in the world and he’ll catch fish as long as you give him enough time to recognize the prevailing pattern. It’s especially important on the Chesapeake where circumstances change quickly and rapid drops in water temperature are not unusual in October. I think fishing conditions shift faster and more often here than anywhere I’ve fished before.  Fortunately, fish are creatures of habit and there are distinct patterns to their behavior.

Read More!