Tag: Stripers

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Fish, No Fish, It’s All the Same. Maryland, May 13, 2018.

May 13, Mother’s Day, we fished with Captain Tom Hughes on the Chesapeake, out of Sandy Point State Park near Annapolis.  I am so good to Kris. 

Saturday night a storm blew through Annapolis. We took an Uber to dinner at the Reynolds Tavern so we could drink wine with impunity, but when the Uber picked us up for the return the storm hit hard.  These are the words of the Uber driver driving back across the bridge to our motel:

“Jesus . . . Jesus . . . Jesus . .  .”

The wind blew his little Prius all over the road, and visibility through the rain was tail lights  at 50 feet.  Wine or no wine I was glad it was him driving and not me.

Our son Andy met us at the motel at 6:30 the next morning. We had coordinates for the launch point, but after ending up in somebody’s driveway we called and got better directions.  The launch, Sandy Point State Park, may have the best launch ramps I’ve ever seen.  Texas could take lessons.  

Captain Hughes fishes a catamaran with dual 115 Suzukis.  Maybe 125s? I should pay attention, but they were plenty power enough.  On that water our skiff would have beat us to hell, not to mention the terror of the thing and the yelling between Kris and me. His Cat was incredibly smooth over fast three-foot seas. Probably not so great to pole on the flats though.

I fished Captain Hughes’ Helios flex-tip 9 wt. Tip-flex? I should pay attention. This was the model before the Helios II, which is the model before the Helios III, which is how these things work. I don’t know how it casts, because the reel was loaded with a 440 grain Orvis Depth-charge line and I was casting a heavy sinking line most of the day into a 20-mile head wind.  I don’t cast so great in those conditions. I did wrap the leader around my neck once. I always joke about wrapping a line around my neck. This time I really did it. 

The leader was a four-foot piece of 20 pound mono with a 6-inch black streamer with heavy barbell eyes. It made a great neck scarf.

Before we got on the water Captain Hughes gave us a safety lecture.  He made us wear inflatable life vests. You gotta trust a guy like that.

We had lousy conditions to begin with and then things got worse.  There were no fish. The wind picked up. The temperature dropped the proverbial 10 degrees and it started raining hard.  Captain Hughes dug his insulated coveralls out of the dry storage for Kris, who was shivering.  Anytime it gets below 60 degrees we folk from Houston start shivering, just on principal. 

Truth is there are from time-to-time less than optimum days fishing, and this was certainly one of those days. On the flip side Captain Hughes was generous and sociable, with great stories, a running commentary on conditions, and good advice about using a boat, and more importantly great tips on using a a sonar and GPS.  That day that’s the way he fished. He looked for fish on the sonar then told us how to drop the sinking line to the fish.  While waiting for the line to sink and drifting in front of the wind (1-hundred-1 , 1-hundred-2, 1-hundred-3 . . . ), I would figure-8 the running line out of the rod trip.  Frankly it was hard for me to keep count. I’m more of a language guy.

Kris and I really liked talking to Captain Hughes about the sonar. He knows sonar, and he invited us under the tee-top and gave lessons on reading the fish finder: what bait looks like, what stripers look like, what structure looks like, how to contact Garmin about the transponder problems we seem to be having back home.

Captain Hughes is older than me I think, and I’m pretty old, but he’s spent a life fishing and he knows his boat and his water. Part of the joy of fishing with a guy like Captain Hughes is hearing his stories, so I won’t give his away, except for the one about Lefty Kreh. He’s got that Baltimore—Balmer—accent, which sounds like a Mid-Atlantic version of a very mild nautical New England lobster pot.  I wish I could retell the story in the accent. Plus I’m making up the dialogue.

Captain Hughes started fly-fishing after someone convinced him that flyfishers caught more stripers. Early on he called Kreh and told him he needed a casting lesson.

“You don’t need a casting lesson,” Kreh said.  

“I need a casting lesson,” Hughes said, and Kreh took him to a pond for a lesson.

Hughes cast, and after a bit Kreh took the rod away.  “You need a casting lesson,” Kreh said.

So fishing with Tom Hughes you’re fishing with a guy who learned to cast from Lefty Kreh.  Our son Andy, who only goes fishing to indulge me, said after Captain Hughes tried to help him cast “I wish people would just leave me alone to figure it out.”

Andy, you are my son. I love you. You are an incredibly bright, talented, and good man, and I couldn’t be prouder. But when somebody taught by Lefty Kreh offers a casting lesson, take the damned lesson. 

Meanwhile Maryland was a fifty-fish bust.  I was now on the schneid in Maryland, Louisiana, and Florida, everywhere but Texas, where I was almost through January before I caught my first fish. I had a great time on the water, ate some pretty good crab cake, learned a lot about sonar, and had fun with my family and Captain Hughes, but I caught no fish in Maryland. Now I have to go back to Maryland. By Sunday afternoon I’d still only caught fish in Texas.

* * *

We left Maryland for Woodstock, Virginia, which is not, by the way, the site of Yasgur’s Farm. Sometimes I get in a car and fall asleep.  I got into the car and fell asleep.  Kris drove. Andy went back to Washington.

I woke up on the west side of D.C. about the time we started seeing the signs for the Manassas National Battlefield, We detoured for Bull Run.

Here’s the thing about travel: you pays your money, you takes your chances. If we hadn’t been there to fish The Chesapeake there were a thousand things we could have done. We could have seen the Tiffany windows in St. Anne’s Episcopal Church. We could have visited the state capitol and the Naval Academy.  We could have hung out and drunk beer.  Instead we fished The Chesapeake. Because we were blown off the water early in Maryland we visited the Manassas National Battlefield.  I would have hated to miss Manassas. 

*  *. *

A week later I finally got my Rockfish at a restaurant in D.C. It was good. Doesn’t count though. Notwithstanding Kris’s suggestion, this isn’t 50 fish platters.

 

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Stripers and The Chesapeake

1859 U.S. Coast Survey’s progress chart of the Chesapeake Bay, Wikimedia Commons.

The Chesapeake (and it’s always The Chesapeake) is bordered by three states, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. We thought about fishing Delaware, but it was too hard logistically. Delaware will have to wait for Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

The drainage for the Chesapeake covers six states, including New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Bay’s border states. Its northern origin starts in the Susquehanna River near Cooperstown, NewYork, the place where baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday (along with the Lazy Susan) in 1840.  It’s an estuary, with fresh, brackish, and saltwater, and is considered to be shallow, but not flats boat shallow. It has an average depth of about 10 feet, and above Annapolis where we’ll fish it’s 35 feet deep.  That’s almost as deep as the Galveston Ship Channel. The guide says we’ll fish with sinking lines. I reckon.

I first met The Chesapeake as a young lawyer circa 1985 when the owners of a Baltimore crab house came to Seadrift, Texas, to talk to  the city council about their crab processing plant. A few years before in Seadrift a shrimper was killed and shrimp boats were fire-bombed in a feud between the locals and Vietnamese immigrants. Meanwhile the Marylanders were in Texas because The Chesapeake didn’t produce enough blue crabs. It wasn’t producing enough blue crabs, or enough oysters, or enough striped bass. It suffered from agriculture runoff, sheet flow from exploding growth, poor sewage treatment, overfishing, and industry.  Still does, though things are better now than then:  striper fishing was banned for a few years to allow stocks to recover, the states have encouraged farmed oyster production rather than dredging, and grass has recovered some.  Every few years the states reach agreements on appropriate goals for cleaning things up. The goals aren’t met though, and all in all improvement is still incremental. I wouldn’t swim in the bay near Baltimore after a heavy rain.

My Marylanders took a helicopter from Houston to Seadrift. It was the first and last time I was in a helicopter.  I remember the Marylanders explained soft shell crabs to me. Who knew?

Stripers are the most popular Chesapeake gamefish, though no one in Maryland calls them stripers:  Rockfish.  The state fish of Maryland is the Rockfish. They’re anadromous, spawning annually through their adulthood in the freshwater tributaries.  Stripers were so common in Colonial America that some of the first colonial game laws prohibited harvesting stripers for fertilizer.  Eight to 40 pound fish are common now, and the largest ever netted was 124 pounds.

Currently the striped bass suffer from an outbreak of mycobacteriosis infections, which relates to agricultural runoff.  It’s tough to regulate agricultural runoff.  That’s like regulating apple pie, and it would have to get past rural legislators.

At its narrowest, The Chesapeake is 2.8 miles across.  At it’s widest, it’s 30 miles. It covers 4,479 square miles. It’s big.

We fish with Captain Tom Hughes. I’ve talked a bit with Captain Hughes, and emailed a bit more. We’re taking nothing, no rods, no flies, no leaders. I figure we’ll learn some about rigging for stripers.