Article by Capt. Lance Smith
One day while working on the boat in the yard at Sunset Marina last week I stopped by the Coastal Fisherman office as they were loading this year’s first issue into trucks for delivery. While catching up with the boss, his mother commented that I remind her of Donald Trump. Apparently, I write what I think before I think about what I am writing!
Picking up a copy of the winter edition and with an entire fishing season ahead, I couldn’t help but think of past seasons and how productive (or unproductive) they were for myself, my family, my friends and all of you who put time in on the water here in Ocean City and Delaware. So this week, no jokes, and no speaking before thinking as the environmental scientist in me has something to discuss.
While every season is unique, sometimes they can be dramatically different from the previous year. Even the “sure things” such as flounder in the bay and dolphin on the lobster pots can become unreliable at best due to the inshore weather and offshore currents. I suppose the point that I am trying to make is that there really is no safe bet when it comes to saltwater fishing and the same species that you limited out on last June 26th may be completely absent from local waters this June 26th. For this reason, as anglers, we often need to adapt to species availability in order to keep our lines tight. Sometimes just a small change in tactics or location is needed, yet other times an entirely different way of fishing may need to be learned, or old tactics may need to be dusted off and re-learned.
A good example of what I am talking about is the red drum, or “puppy drum” as most call this member of the croaker family that is so coveted by anglers to our South. Now, if you are a surf fisherman, you know how much the fall run of large red drum off of Assateague can vary from year to year, and you expect this as an inevitability. However, if you rented a boat on vacation two years ago and caught your limit of puppy drum in the bay, and then tried to employ the same tactics this past season, you would have come up empty. They simply weren’t here. Except for a few drum that showed up in the Ocean City Inlet for about a week in August last year, the great fishing that we had experienced with these fish for a few seasons was a total loss. There are probably as many theories as there were drum caught last year as to why this occurred and I have my own.
The drum that were caught last year were slightly over the maximum size that the law will allow a person to keep. The previous year, they were slightly under the maximum slot limit in size. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that at some point in the past we experienced a good recruitment year or two and many red drum spawned close enough to Ocean City to allow the young to take up residence in the back bay. This same year class of fish returned each season larger than the year before until their maturation forced a change in their migration pattern. Hopefully, these larger returning drum will spawn in local waters and the cycle will begin again. It may be a few years before we see this fishery return or I could be totally wrong and they could show up out of nowhere.
The point of all this is that regardless of why this species was absent last season, the fact remains that they were indeed absent and time spent fishing for them was lost time. This is the reason that every season, every month, every day and every hour spent fishing, we as fisherman need to be prepared to change. This is also why publications such as the Coastal Fisherman are such invaluable tools. If you are from out of town and you are reading this column, you most likely try to get your hands on every copy throughout the summer. With the Coastal Fisherman’s website, you can now also get online and read past issues that you may have missed. In keeping up with the current fishing scene around the area, it isn’t too hard to begin to see patterns develop. Now, there certainly is the possibility (especially offshore) of the “you should have been here yesterday” syndrome that needs to be taken into consideration when determining which species of fish to target. For the most part, what was caught last week is what you can expect to catch this week. While locations, depths, tide stage and the time of day certain fish bite may change day to day, you can’t expect to catch a species of fish if it isn’t there.
Prior to about 15 years ago, large sea trout (weakfish) were a mainstay in the bay and many party boats fished just off the beach in the fall for the massive run of their smaller siblings. Unlike the previously mentioned red drum, I believe that the sea trout fishery collapsed for a totally different reason. One night perhaps ten years ago, I was fishing from the Route 50 Bridge with a good friend of mine. I stared into the shadows next to a piling in amazement as school after school of baitfish were engulfed by a striped bass of about 40 pounds every time they wandered too closely to her feeding post. After an hour or so of throwing everything in my tackle box at this particular fish I decided to attempt to “match the hatch”, exactly. I removed a treble hook from one of my lures, tied it directly to my line and added a few heavy split shot directly above it. I lowered the hook about two feet below the surface and waited for another school of herring, shad or whatever they were to swim by. After several failed attempts, I finally managed to snag one and reeled up what was to my disbelief, a young sea trout of about 6 or 7 inches.
At the peak of the sea trout fishery in Ocean City, the striped bass population in the Chesapeake Bay and all up and down the East Coast was at an all-time low. Stripers were essentially non-existent in our locality until a moratorium was enacted and the population was allowed to rebound. Again, it doesn’t take a scientist to see the correlation between the return of striped bass and the decline of sea trout. After all, sea trout are just another member of the croaker family, like red drum and Norfolk spot. Soft fleshed and lacking any spiny fin rays, the trout in all of their abundance proved to be the perfect forage for the recovering striper population. Once again, this may only be part of the reason for the disappearance of weakfish but the fact remains that they have not been a “targetable” species for many years.
So what is the point behind my crazy theories on fish populations and why should we, as anglers, be concerned with them? Well, if you are a local and you have all summer to attempt catching a sea trout, or red drum, odds are that you will succeed. If you are vacationing with the family, or coming down with a few dedicated days with which to fish, odds are that you won’t. It pays to do a little research before venturing onto the water in order to determine the best options you may have for hooking into some fish.
Four or five years ago, you could have chartered a boat for the Ocean City Tuna Tournament and possibly won some money by concentrating your efforts on bluefin tuna on the inshore lumps. A single large bluefin or a bluefin/yellowfin combination stringer could get you on the board. If you tried fishing WWB (way, way back) ballyhoo/Ilander combinations at the Hambone last year in hopes of receiving one of those giant tournament paychecks, you would have been extremely disappointed as you watched bigeye tuna after bigeye tuna come to the scales. While some boats did manage a few large bluefin last year, the fish were never really caught with any sort of frequency or in large quantities. Was it that no one was targeting them and everyone was concentrating on the bigeye bite? Or had they simply moved through our area and taken up residence to the North? Who knows? The bigeye bite has been spectacular for the past few seasons but if you weren’t willing to spend the night in the canyons, or reach the fishing grounds pre-dawn, you were left scratching your head.
Bluefin and bigeye; both tuna species, both available in different numbers seasonally and two completely different ways for catching each. If you didn’t adapt your way of fishing to the predominantly available tuna species, you probably had a poor tuna season last year.
Perhaps my favorite (or most frustrating) anomaly in species abundance is the Norfolk spot. While spot populations may be cyclical and completely environmentally dependent, I have watched for more than a decade as the population of bait sized spot in the area has been supplanted by pinfish. Pinfish are a small member of the grunt family and are highly prized as baitfish in states to our south like Florida. Even if you have never caught one, odds are that if you read any of the big monthly sportfishing magazines, you have seen a picture or at least heard them mentioned. I can still remember the very first one I ever caught in the canal behind the house here in Ocean City. I recognized it instantly as the same fish that my friend and I would frequently catch behind his father’s place in the Florida Keys every winter. I was stunned. Was this fish lost? I was so excited to catch this (what I thought was) tropical species that I devoted an entire 55 gallon aquarium to housing a few of them for the summer. Looking back, I wish I would have stomped the guts out of those first couple of visitors. While I used to be able to put a few dozen spot into my homemade holding pens in an hour, these ravenous little suckers have made me all but give up on fishing for spot in the canal. I must spend about a quarter of my summer rigging and re-rigging my nieces, nephews and the neighboring kids rods and reels with small hooks and bits of clam or bloodworm so that they can fish in the canal. While this endeavor used to be to my benefit in the way of free spot, now I have to answer the question of, “Is this a spot?” three dozen times a day. Invariably, the answer is always “no”. I will bet that for every 40 pinfish the kids may catch in the canal, they may catch 5 spot. Why is this so bad? They are great bait in Florida you say? Tarpon and snook love them!
Well, apparently our local gamefish have yet to “adapt” as we are forced to do and they simply do not like pinfish as a forage species. Pinfish, unlike the soft rayed Norfolk spot, have extremely sharp dorsal spines, much like a freshwater sunfish or bluegill. If you are a striper, flounder or sea trout, I can imagine that having a bunch of needles poking through your stomach is much less appealing than soft bodied spot in your gullet.
Speaking of southern visitors, pulling in from a day of offshore tuna/marlin fishing, it was much to my surprise when my friend (the same one I spent time with in the Keys) told me that the kids had caught a grouper. Thanks to today’s phones, there it was, clear as day, an iPhone picture of a small gag grouper in David’s hand. Turns out that it was one of the first of a few hundred or more that were to be caught by fisherman and in crab pots throughout our coastal bays. Pinfish, grouper? Global warming? I don’t know and I don’t really care.
What matters is that if I don’t want to pay $2.00 a piece for spot from the local tackle shop, I have to work ten times harder and fish in new locations in order to catch my own bait.
Don’t even get me started on bluefish! I have not seen a bluefish in my chum slick while shark fishing in so long I cannot recall when I had. The typical run of bluefish starts in the bay around Mother’s Day. This year though, they showed up around the first week of April and we may have seen the best of what’s to come. I used to take a few frozen mackerel offshore for a day of mako shark fishing knowing that I could count on fresh bluefish fillets caught by way of my spinning rod in the chum slick. I can recall 14 pound bluefish being caught on a shark rig baited with a half of a bluefish! Now, I have to spend a day trying to catch the smaller snapper blues in the bay so that I have quality bait. Did I start sharking further offshore? Perhaps. Are bluefish caught on the bottom along the continental shelf during the winter by anglers who are sea bass fishing? Certainly. Have their migration patterns shifted due to some unknown environmental factor? No clue here. All I know is that I had to adapt and get my shark bait from an entirely different source, even though it was the same species.
I have heard it said a thousand times if I have heard it once; Fish have tails, they swim. What is here today may be gone tomorrow. In any case, and regardless of the reason for it, you certainly have a better chance of catching what was here yesterday versus what was here 12 or 24 months ago. So, whether you are fishing from shore, a rental boat or running offshore, do your homework before you spend your time and money on a fish that doesn’t exist. Maybe the increased bluefin allotment will change the way we fish and water temperatures will be more favorable for them to stick around this summer. Maybe big sheepshead will invade the inlet jetties like they did a few years ago. Maybe I will hit the lottery tonight and you’ll never hear from me again! I don’t know, you don’t know, and none of the government scientists can figure any of this out. All I do know is that until I see quality catches of puppy drum, sea trout and bluefins in the pages of the Coastal Fisherman, I will be fishing for flounder, stripers, bigeyes and white marlin.
Lance Smith is an outdoor writer and Captain of his family’s boat, ‘Longfin”.
