Well hello readers. It seems I’ve become quite lazy over the past year, and not posted anything. Let’s not dwell on that sad fact, and instead get right back to fishing.
I don’t have any earth shattering fly fishing news for the past year. Last fall’s local inshore fishing was unremarkable, and the Chesapeake striper run was equally unremarkable. My dad, my brother, and I took a trip down to Cape Lookout at the beginning of November for the famed false albacore run, and were dismayed with a poor showing by the fish. Even the local Sage & Rio pro-staff (Brian Horsley & Sarah Gardner) appeared to be frustrated with the fishing. We followed the same shrimp boat for an hour, normally a productive target allies coming to devour the bycatch being shoveled off the shrimper. After wandering the areas immediately offshore of Shackleford Banks and not finding any telltale bait pods with feeding albies , we had a great time fishing the inshore marshes for speckled trout and flounder. It’s certainly an area I want to revisit someday. The highlight of the trip for me was seeing how well my dad’s new Sea Hunt 22BX bay boat performed. It was equally adept at rocketing over the tightly stacked two-footers in Beaufort Inlet as it was navigating the winding shallows of Core & Bogue Sounds.
Freshwater fishing has been mostly productive. My dad and I enjoyed a nice two days of fishing at Rose River Farm back in May, and my wife and I celebrated ten years together by floating the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho in June and landing a rainbow-brown-cutthroat slam. In July, we took advantage of a rare 70-degree weekend and forayed into the backcountry of Shenandoah National Park, camping near a brook trout stream that ended up being a bear-infested trickle with no trout.
Saltwater fishing this summer has been slow. I took a group of friends offshore back in June and after landing one small yellowfin tuna on conventional gear, endured a horribly rough three-hour ride back to Virginia Beach from the Norfolk Canyon. We have also been pounding the Lower Bay in the tower of Perseverance, looking for cobia. So far this summer is has only been small throwback fish using spinning rods, but hopefully we can manage to find some larger fish willing to take a fly as they school up before their return south in late September.
I don’t do much shallow water fishing in the summer. There’s usually only a short window in the early morning before the sun comes up where fish are active. However, my dad and I did go out last weekend on a (relatively) cool, 80-degree cloudy day. We found a school of small puppy drum feeding heavily against a marshy bank. I even saw a few tails come up, something frequently observed further south, but a rarity here in Virginia. The water was incredibly clouded from the feeding activity, and I suspect they were feeding on a very small prey. I managed to hook one 12″ fish on a small bendback fly that somewhat imitates a grass shrimp or mud minnow. My first fly-caught puppy drum!
Seeing this school was a good sign; hopefully these fish weather this winter and come back in the 20″ range next summer. For speckled trout and puppy drum, the Chesapeake Bay marks the northern extent of their range, and as such, the local populations are subject to die-off during hard, cold winters. Although I love a nasty winter for the good duck hunting it brings, the tradeoff is that the inshore fishing the following year will usually suffer.