Bark bark bark, bark bark, bark bark bark.

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This is the time of year I like to walk along Tuckahoe Creek near Queen Anne, Maryland casting for perch and chain pickerel.  For the past couple of years I’ve only caught white perch on the Tuckahoe.  I’ve missed the earlier yellow perch spawn because it frequently coincides with the first wave of pre-spawn rockfish. I thought I might miss it again this year, but today’s rainy windy weather kept me off the Bay.  My four-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever Crockett and I left Kent Island about noon and took the long way around before parking the truck and hiking in to my favorite perch holes.  The rain poured and the fish bit.  It wasn’t hot and heavy like I’ve been hearing about in the Western Shore creeks, but I finished up with six keepers out of a couple dozen  perch, and released a nice pickerel.  My lure was a chartreuse one-thirty-second ounce feather fly tied by my Severn River Rod & Keg Club brother Woody of Maryland Tackle.  I jigged it under a tiny green top float.  A feather fly coupled with a buoyant, lively float is a combination my dad taught me.  My brother Creig has been wearing out the crappie in the TVA lakes using it.  It’s a very specific technique because any old float won’t work. I think I’ll keep the brand name to myself for now, but you might be able to figure it out from the video.  It was great to get out and stream fish for a while.  I’ll visit the Tuckahoe again once the white perch run begins.  As you can tell, Crockett is in his element in the rainy woods.  Read More!

On the margin of the river,
Washing up its silver spray,
We will talk and worship ever,
All the happy golden day.  – from Shall we Gather at the River, Robert Lowery, 1864

With Stevensville church bells ringing in the distance, we pulled into the parking lot at the Kent Narrows boat ramp about 11:00 AM.  I always feel a little bad about fishing on Sunday mornings.  My father was a Church of Christ minister who preached for a small Appalachian congregation in the Clinch mountain highlands near Sneedville, Tennessee.  Needless to say, when I was a kid we went to church every time the doors opened.  Dad was also one of the best bass fishermen in the Southeast.  When the bass pros came to fish the big tournaments, he was the first person they contacted.  People said he was a fisher of fish and a fisher of men.  It wasn’t unusual to see him fishing in a suit and tie before or after church services, but we never missed church.

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To fizz or not to fizz, that is the question a lot of yellow perch fishermen have been asking lately. As you can see by this sonar shot, yellow perch can hold in a wide range of depths this time of year in the Chesapeake Bay. At issue is that a few of the fish we catch from the deepest water come up with distended swim bladders. Since we inevitably land a few that are under the legal size limit, they have to be released.  Because of all the air in their bodies, they can’t always swim back down.  This leaves them floating on top of the water where they are vulnerable to birds and other predators. The practice of puncturing a fishes swim bladder with a hypodermic needle or other sharp object to relieve pressure is called fizzing.  It works for some species, but for others it isn’t such a good idea.  What about yellow perch? This week, I put the question to the experts. I spoke with several fisheries biologists I know, including some at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.  Here’s what I learned. Read More!

Ring perch, that’s what my fishing buddy Rich calls them, but considering the impact they’re having on the economy of the upper Chesapeake Bay, they might as well be called gold fish. If ever there was a Chesapeake fisheries management success story it’s what we are experiencing right now with yellow perch. As fishermen pour in from all over, posting one successful fishing report after another, it’s obvious that Maryland can proudly boast one of the best perch fisheries in the United States. I don’t know about you, but I consider that one heck of an accomplishment, and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) should be proud.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t always this way.  For the past couple of decades yellow perch fishing has been a shadow of what it could be.  As of 2005 there were few limits on the commercial harvest of yellow perch.  Netters could set their traps almost wherever and whenever they wanted taking as many fish as they could catch.  Almost all our Maryland fish were sold outside the state.  The only benefit to our economy was in lining the pockets of a few commercial fishermen. In 2008, that all changed. Read More!