Article by Dale Timmons
Welcome to the annual winter edition of Coastal Fisherman. In our last weekly issue in September, I wished you “light winds,” among other things, but I must have jinxed us all, because that certainly hasn’t been the case. We’ve had another fall and early winter of wind, wind and more wind, including some serious northeasters that have devastated the beaches from Delaware to North Carolina. Fishing during that time period has been hit and miss. We had a continued good white marlin bite in late September into October, and there were tuna offshore all the way into November, but very few anglers were chasing them. In their infinite wisdom, the feds saw fit to close the sea bass season just as the fall fishing was cranking up. This action, coupled with the flounder closure in Maryland, gave ocean bottom fishermen very little reason to even go out. Inshore, the speckled trout season was practically nonexistent, and after years of chasing specks, it is still a mystery to me why they are here some years and gone the next. At least I still have all those new lures I bought in anticipation of this year’s season, not to mention a rod and reel or two. The fall red drum season was fairly productive, although one of those northeasters came right in the height of it and certainly didn’t help matters. Good numbers of large reds were caught by anglers fishing the inshore shoals in boats, but for some reason (probably the abundance of food on the shoals) not too many of these fish came into the surf. Along the Virginia barrier islands, there were a lot of puppy drum and “yearlings” in the 30-inch class, but not a lot of larger fish, at least in my experience. Oddly enough, there were at least two puppy drum caught the last week of November and the first week of December on Assateague. More proof that you never know what might happen if you have bait in the water. Even though we had a lot of wind, temperatures have been relatively mild, and water temps remained in the mid-50s into early December, so we had a striper season where the fish kind of “trickled down”, though I think quite a few fish got by us in the bad northeaster in mid-November. There were still a lot of bunker in the ocean in early December, however, which meant that both stripers and big bluefish hung around. Even though a lot of striper anglers weren’t too happy about it, this was probably one of the best seasons in recent memory for the big bluefish, both just off the beach and in the surf (good news for folks selling 9-inch plastic shad bodies). These slammers were big, too. I heard of at least one 39-incher from Assateague, and I caught a few myself that would have probably topped the 15-pound mark. Anyway, as this is being written in early December, there are still blues and stripers around, but there is yet another “coastal low” coming up the beach…
I am sad to note the passing of yet another member of the local fishing community, as Capt. Walter Austin left us in November. Walt ran his charter boat, the “Arno”, out of Talbot St. Pier for many years. He was a friendly, low key kind of guy, a true gentleman in every sense of the word, and he will be missed. Walt loved bottom fishing, especially the offshore winter fishery for sea bass and tautog, so here’s hoping that wherever he is, the seas are calm, the sea bass are big, fat “knotheads”, and there aren’t any seasons or limits…
In this winter issue I often write about “what worked for me” in the fall season, but I have to be honest and admit that I had such a slow fall that there isn’t much to write about in that regard. I did have a pretty good early season on the small red drum, fish up to a little over 30 inches. I think I caught 15 or so, and one of the things that worked well was something old that is new again, as the saying goes, namely spinner blades. Many years ago I fished a few times with a gentleman named Joe Sparrow, who has been deceased for some time. Joe was from Onancock, VA, and in many ways he was a pioneer in fishing Virginia’s Eastern Shore. With his friend Claude Rogers, who was the director of the Virginia Saltwater Sportfishing Tournament for a long time, Joe was the first to fish for cod off Virginia, and he and Claude also discovered the presence of tarpon in the Virginia seaside marshes in the late 50’s. Anyway, Joe loved to fish spinner blade hooks, usually straight out of the package on a mono top and bottom rig. They were mostly inexpensive bronzed hooks in an octopus style. He would use the same hook, just in different sizes, for several different species. I think the largest they came in was a 5/0, and that was his “go to” hook for large red drum. For puppy drum he would use about a 2/0 or 3/0, and he “accidentally” caught quite a few big drum on the small rigs while fishing for puppies. I started thinking back about Joe and his spinner blades when another friend of mind told me he had burned small black drum in the surf down in Virginia on spinner blade hooks after he had run out of plain snelled hooks. I started making spinner blade versions of my short-leadered puppy drum rigs, and I was very impressed at how well they worked. Most of mine had 4/0 circle or octopus circle hooks with gold, silver or chartreuse blades and various colored beads. I tied them with 60 or 80 lb. line. With good hooks and high-end blades that won’t rust, they are expensive to make, so I don’t know if they will ever be widely available on the commercial market, but if you make your own rigs, they are definitely worth trying. Of course, you could do like Joe and just use spinner blade hooks straight out of the package…
Consider the following random thoughts:
• Many years ago you weren’t allowed to keep a striper over 15 lbs. in the state of Maryland. That was later changed to a 32-inch maximum, which is about the same size fish. Now we are encouraged to kill the large breeding females, but on most of the mid-Atlantic coast we can’t keep even one small fish in the 18 to 26-inch range to eat.
• When size limits were first put in place for flounder (and I admit I pushed for a limit) we were told that at 12 inches at least 50 per cent of flounder would have a chance to breed. Now the limit is up to 18 and 19 inches or even more, and recreational anglers are facing stricter creel limits and season closures, even in the face of an ever growing flounder population.
• The Atlantic coast recreational catch limit of 250 billfish per year is an arbitrary and capricious number brought about by one gentleman testifying before a federal committee who was asked, “About how many billfish do sport fishermen bring in per year?”, and answered something like, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe 250.” If he had answered 500, would the catch limit be twice as high?
The list of absurdities could go on and on, in the face of which I have come up with the following observations:
• The federal government should get out of fisheries management altogether, at least for recreational anglers, and let the states manage fisheries like they did successfully for many years, without strong arming them with threats of cutting off federal funding.
• Assuming the above, the regional fishery management councils and the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) should be eliminated. They have failed miserably anyway, and this move would save the American taxpayers a lot of wasted dollars.
• The Marine Recreational Fisheries Statistical Survey (MRFSS) should be eliminated. Another complete waste of paper and taxpayers’ dollars.
• The Sustainable Fisheries Act portion of the Magnuson-Stevens law should be repealed, thereby eliminating the basis for many of the time consuming and money wasting lawsuits brought by extreme environmental groups who are mainly just trying to justify millions of dollars in donations from individuals and companies with too much money on their hands and no understanding that they are being duped.
Of course, none of this will ever happen. The powers-that-be, the lawyers and the bureaucrats are too entrenched, and the politicians are too cowardly to admit failure. So look on the bright side—it will be warm again in a few months, and maybe they will even let us catch a fish to bring home to eat…
Contact Dale Timmons at [email protected] or call 410-629-1191.
