Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 4, 1994 TAG: 9404050009
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The afternoon is bright, but cold, with a raw wind whistling out of the north, making the main lake as rough as a newly plowed field.
Even with winter in the wind, spring is like a yeast to nature that can't be denied. A mallard drake follows a hen into a small cove, the iridescent green head and yellow bill of the male adding color to the subtle hues around it. Robins chirp in shoreline cedars. A flock of soot-colored cormorants wing about in uneasy flight, as if uncertain whether to settle down or move on.
Beneath the discolored water, spring is more difficult to observe, but its influences are no less certain. Striped bass have left their deep-water holding areas and moved into the shallows. Wilson has found a school scattered along a flat that borders a stretch of crescent-shaped shoreline.
``I had been catching the devil out of fish suspended over trees, then all of a sudden I couldn't catch them,'' he says
The striper had moved, and for a brief time were in that difficult transition period, between winter and spring.
Then a couple of weeks ago, during an outing with his daughter, Wendy , Wilson turned his back on the deep water that had treated him kindly January through early March and began sending bucktails toward spring-holding areas along the shoreline. The striper had arrived.Wendy got a 12-pounder.
Hooking that initial fish of the season in the shallows is as robust a statement on spring as spotting the first robin of the year.
A guide on the lake for more than 25 years, Wilson has been catching and releasing impressive numbers of shallow-feeding stripers the past two weeks. At the Sportsman Inn and Marina restaurant the other evening, he paused to make a count.
``I caught 31 on a short trip on Thursday, 50 Friday, 38 yesterday, 27 today.''
Wilson is talking about numbers, not weights. Many of the fish, like the first digging of new potatoes, are of modest size. He did land a 20-pounder along a stretch of rip-rap, a reminder that this species is called rockfish for good reason in its native, saltwater habitat.
``The numbers will ease off, and the size will get bigger,'' he says, but he wonders aloud if the smallness of the fish means a scarcity of larger ones.
The reasons that the striper go shallow can vary: because of the warming of winter water, because of the same migratory mysteries that give the cormorants unsettled flight, because of the slant of the sun, because of who knows what. But for Wilson, there is a definitive, one-word explanation. ``Food.'' They are shallow because that is where the baitfish - the shad, the alewives - happen to be.
The three-quarter-ounce jig Wilson throws represents one of those baitfish. The lure's modest profile gives it a winter-gaunt look. It is just a few wisps of white deer tail gathered around a lead head, then garnished with a hackle feather which adds a touch of color - yellow, blue or chartreuse - and motion.
The lightness of the lure makes snagging the bottom less threatening in the shallows. It also makes the offering more difficult to toss into the teeth of a gale with tackle heavy enough to handle a burly striper. Wilson's casts are more like chip shots than drives, finesse, not power.
The jigs are so challenging to cast, so fastidious to tie, so difficult to find in a tackle shop that most anglers simply don't bother with them. They will chose a three-eights-ounce jig or a Cordell Red Fin plug.
Gerald Almy, who fishes across North America as a staff writer for Sports Afield magazine, has described Wilson's light tackle-shallow water approach as a rarity among striped-bass anglers, who frequently adhere to the old ``big lure-big fish'' adage.
What counts, the stripers love the little jigs when they are retrieved painfully slowly, an action Wilson calls ``swimming'' the bait.
``I tell my customers, `I will furnish the jigs. You only pay for the ones you lose.'
``Had a guy out here who snagged one and broke if off. Didn't even try to get it loose. He snagged another and broke it off.
``I told him, `You know, I charge $25 apiece for those jigs.'
``Without changing his expression he said, `Maybe you'd better tie on a cheaper one for me.'''
Dale Wilson operates a guide service out of the Sportsman Inn and Marina and can be reached in Huddleston at 703-297-5650.
by CNB