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!

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.

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The good news is that those migratory fish I talked about last week – you know, the ones that sneak in through the C&D canal every October – well, they’re here.  Since last Tuesday, reports of big, clean fish with sea lice have been flooding in. The bad news is that the Upper Chesapeake Bay is still so murky that those big stripers are moving quickly down the channel searching for cleaner water and more plentiful bait fish.  They haven’t gone too far south, but they have bypassed the northern humps and ledges where we’ve found them in years past.  The ugly part is that, since those fish showed up in some very accessible high-traffic areas, word got out quickly and a bite that traditionally lasts until the end of October shut down in just a few days. At the end of last week, fishing was very good, but soon hoards of inexperienced fishermen, some with screaming kids, running engines, and blaring radios, descended on an area that is shorter and narrower than a football field. That caused the fish to hunker down and become very difficult to catch. Difficult, but not impossible.  It’s been a tough week, but there are trophy stripers in our area right now, and fishing is sure to improve as more and more migratory fish enter the Chesapeake.

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Over the last three days I’ve caught fifty speckled trout. That’s forty-eight more than I’ve caught in the previous five years here on the Chesapeake Bay. I’m sure I could have caught a few in years past had I targeted them, or if I fished farther south in the marshes, but that isn’t necessary right now because, for whatever reason, the trout are here in force. This week, Maryland fishermen have reported speckled trout as far north as Matapeake Pier and well into the Eastern Bay rivers. Also known as spotted sea trout, or simply “specks,”  these colorful fish were once plentiful throughout the Bay.  Their numbers have been down in recent years, but if this season is any indicator, things are looking up. Adult specks are migratory, usually moving into the Bay in late April to spawn before swimming farther north toward Maryland.  Since they prefer warm, salty water, they’re usually gone by mid-November. They aren’t true trout but are related to croakers and drum, and will sometimes make a groaning or grunting sound when caught.  Here’s what they sound like  CLICK HERE and here’s how to catch them.

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We interrupt this hurricane blog to bring you a fishing report.  Yes, this IS a website dedicated to light tackle fishing, and on most Sunday evenings, that’s what I do.  I spent most of the day singing the lumberjack song with chainsaw in hand, cutting up the trees and limbs that fell in our yard.  After seeing all the trees down around Kent Island today, I’m surprised that we didn’t have more damage than we did.  We are also fortunate that the only complete tree that was uprooted in our yard fell harmlessly instead of taking out our picket fence or part of the church next door.  We worked on the house and yard most of the afternoon, finishing about 5:00 PM.  That left just enough time to go fishing.

I launched Thunder Road at Matapeake and ran north to the Bay Bridge.  Winds were about 12 knots out of the west when I started, but came down to near zero as the evening wore on.  The water was stained, but not as much as I expected.  Water temperature and air temperature were exactly the same at 76 degrees. That’s significant because the water has been well into the 80s.  It means there was a lot of top-to-bottom mixing due to the storm. I did expect the fish to be freaked out and hunkered down, and they were.  I gave the Bay Bridge a good shot, but only caught one little rockfish.  I thought the fish might be deep, so I started my fishing trip looking for more of a winter pattern.  I marked a few fish deep, but I couldn’t get them to bite.  I moved to the shallow pilings and there wasn’t anything going on there either.  Read More!

Most of the damage here on the island came from falling trees.  Since the wind is still gusting into the 40 mile-per-hour range, and the ground is completely saturated, more trees could fall.  I’ve heard of a few houses and stores that were hit by flying debris, tree limbs, etc. but it sounds like most of the island came through the storm fine. UPDATE: 12:36 PM – One confirmed death in Queenstown due to a falling tree leading to a chimney collapse. We lost power here in historic Stevensville at 10:14 PM, but it was back on at 9:00 AM.

Since the storm stayed off the coast and winds have stayed from the northeast, a storm surge never materialized, but there were some very big waves on the Bay. I’m attaching a graph from the Gooses Reef Buoy. A giant 29-foot wave was recorded by First Landing Buoy at the mouth of the Bay near Cape Henry. That may be the biggest wave ever recorded for the Chesapeake.

I will eventually get out and look around, but I think it’s wise to keep the roads clear for emergency vehicles and highway crews right now. We still hear sirens from time to time. The Bay Bridge has reopened under Phase II wind restrictions. Here’s some shots of our house and the immediate area.