Article by Dale Timmons
Last week I had the privilege of looking through an old scrapbook kept by an avid red drum surf fisherman who was fishing primarily in the 1930s. The gentleman’s name was George R. Vickers. He was from the Baltimore area, but he was apparently pretty well off and had a “summer house” in Ocean City. In his scrapbook, Mr. Vickers kept photos and detailed notes on catches he and his friends made from the beach, right down to the sting rays and sharks, croakers, etc. Mr. Vickers won first place in the Field and Stream Big Fish Contest in 1933 with a 58 lb. red drum that was 51 inches long and had a 32-inch girth. The fish was caught on “mossbunker”, which is nothing more than menhaden, or just “bunker.” Vickers was using a Pflueger reel loaded with Ashaway line on a Kingfisher rod. Second place in that same year went to his friend Tom Taylor of Berlin, MD, who also caught a 58-pounder. I had the honor of knowing Mr. Taylor when I used to shoot trap, and he was the Secretary/Treasurer of the Sinepuxent Rod & Gun Club. This was in the early 1970s, and I was just starting to become a “drum head.” I had no idea at the time that Mr. Taylor had been a red fanatic when he was much younger. I would have picked his brain if I had. I did know that he was the inventor of the “storm sinker” or “hurricane sinker” used by many surf anglers. He even had a patent on the design, but it has long ago expired, and the sinker has been copied up and down the coast. The genuine “Tom Taylors” were made with a u-shaped piece of heavy copper wire rather than a brass eyelet. Mr. Taylor left the original soapstone molds to his friend Jack Fisher of Berlin, whose sons now possess them.
But I digress. Mr. Vickers’ and Mr. Taylor’s 58-pounders were caught in 1933, the same year that a severe August storm cut the Ocean City inlet. Before the storm, the two men merely drove down the beach from Ocean City, usually south to either Fox Hill Levels or all the way to “Assateague Light” in Virginia. Vickers’ 58-pounder, for instance, was caught “30 miles south of Ocean City”. After the inlet was cut, they went to Assateague by ferry from South Point. One of the things that struck me was that many of their red drum were caught in late June or even through July. The 58-pounder was taken on July 19, and Mr. Vickers had a 56-pounder on June 23, 1935. On June 26, 1935, the two men, along with John D. Ayres of Ocean City, caught nine reds at Fox Hill Levels. These fellows drum fished all summer. Nowadays, most surf anglers target red drum in May and early June, then quit until September. I have seen a few big reds caught “by accident” in July on Assateague over the years, however. Maybe we all just quit too soon…
Karl Wickstrom is the founder and Editor-In-Chief of “Florida Sportsman” magazine. He was instrumental in getting the gill net ban passed in Florida several years ago, a move which has proven to be key to restoring many fish species in the Sunshine State. In his June 2010 “Openers” column in FS, Wickstrom takes on the environmental extremists who basically want us all to stop fishing. He calls them the “Bright Greenies,” whom he describes as “well meaning citified folks who don’t like fishing and don’t see why anyone else should either.”
As I have been saying for a few years now, with many of these organizations it’s all about the money, and Wickstrom puts it well: “For most of Florida Sportsman’s four decades, we ignored what we thought of as inexperienced fanatics. These folks wouldn’t kill any living thing (presumably including garbage maggots and diseased and dangerous animals) but they don’t hesitate to buy plastic-wrapped meat that they perhaps think was born that way”
“But the Bright Greenies are more difficult to ignore now because many of them are packed to the gills with ammunition—called money. Gobs of it. They can and do enlist naïve celebrities and hire the most expensive public relations companies to spread false information to the effect that John Doe and his family are just as responsible for overfishing as the industrial commercial fleets.
Thus, we are faced with campaigns to stop all fishing, not just the commercial overkills.”
“You’ll find the Bright Greenies first in line to sing praises about added no-fishing zones where all manner of traditional family enjoyments are eliminated, in the name of, believe it or not, fairness to ‘user groups.’”
Wickstrom goes on the specifically cite the Atlantic red snapper shutdown of hundreds of square miles of ocean, but his words apply to much more of the current attack on recreational anglers: “Compromised managers, cheered on by the Bright Greenies, appear happy to prohibit the smallest of family-level catches if the commercial overkills can’t proceed as always in the federal saltwater jungle.”
“We must continue to foster the meaning of conservation to be ‘wise use’ rather than ‘no use.’ ” Amen to that…
Spent a fine day on the water near the Chesapeake Bay-Bridge Tunnel last week with a friend of mine, Scott Bruning, who manages Caruso’s Pizza in Ocean City.
We were targeting cobia with fresh cut bunker fished on the bottom, and for once we got lucky and caught our limit of one fish apiece. They weren’t huge, but in the 40-inch range they were just the right size to eat. Now, there is kind of an ongoing debate amongst cobia anglers about whether to gaff or net. Cobia can be kind of wild at the side of the boat and very much so after you actually put them in the boat. Some captains swear by the gaff; others prefer a large net. On this trip, I hooked up first, and when the fish came to the side, admittedly a little green, Scott hit it with the gaff and quickly threw it in the boat. Well, he must have struck a major artery near the throatlatch, because in an instant it was like someone had tied a cherry bomb to a balloon filled with blood and lit the fuse. Both of us (plus the whole cockpit) were covered in blood. As they say on those CSI TV shows, it gave a whole new meaning to the term “arterial spray.” I had blood from my hat to my toes. To top it off, we only had one rag in the boat. Well, after we laughed at ourselves and put the fish on ice and cleaned up the mess as best we could, Scott hooked up about an hour later (just as we were eating a piece of fried chicken, of course). This fish put up a little better fight, and I reached for the net, which wasn’t as big as I would have liked, but it did the job, and I quickly had the cobe in the boat. It lay there almost passively in the net while we removed the circle hook. If we go back again, I’ll have to find a bigger net first, but I definitely know which side of the debate gets my vote…
Contact Dale Timmons at [email protected] or call 410-629-1191.
