Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 17, 1994 TAG: 9411170095
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"It is a dependable, sure bet," said Claud Bane, director of the Virginia Salt Water Fishing Tournament.
So why don't more people take advantage of it?
"I can't get any takers," said Bain.
He remembers the time he discovering the big blues that gather each October and November along the wrecks off the Virginia Coast. It was by accident, 10 years ago.
He had taken a couple of writer-photographers, Joel Arrington and George Reiger, fishing.
"Joe was interested in the big tautogs that had developed at the time off Wachapreague," Bain said. "A new world's record had just been caught and subsequently was broken by another fish off Wachapreage."
After fishing a wreck for a couple of hours that day, the tog fishing suddenly turned bloody.
"Our fish started getting chopped in half," Bain said.
A school of jumbo-size bluefish had moved in and were clamping their steel-trap jaws on the fish Bain and his buddies were hooking.
When Bain got back to Virginia Beach, he called several charter boat skippers who fish the wrecks.
"They said, 'Yeah, every year in mid-October the bluefish start moving in there and start chopping up our fish.'"
While the skippers were speaking about the blues with disdain, Bain could see a new, late-season fishery developing.
"The next year, we went out and trolled around the wrecks. We picked a few bluefish up here and there, but it wasn't what I call really exciting. We had some schools of fish that were breaking, but they weren't terribly interested in our spoons, tubelures and stuff like that.
"So the following year we decided that the thing we had to do was go out there and dump chum in the water. I tell you, all hell broke lose."
Scores of big blues were lured within casting distance. Huge blues. "Gorilla blues," is the way Bain describes them.
"These are the 12- to 14-pound spring fish that are now 16 to 18 to 20 pounds," he said.
"Since that time we have chummed those things and we haven't been skunked a single trip and we have caught tons of those things. You can go and anchor on virtually any wreck off the coast that is 5 to 20 miles out, throw chum in the water and put some baits back there and catch bluefish."
The big blues will hit most anything, even flies.
Robert Bryant used a streamer fly to land a 17-pound, citation-size blue the other day while fishing with Bain and Frank Wright, who produces the Southern Sportsman TV series.
"It was like getting hold of a freight train," said Bryant, the manager of the Orvis Store in Roanoke.
Bryant's co-worker, Paul Scott, had tied several 6- to 12-inch streamers, which the two anglers cast with No.10 rods.
"It was tough to get them in," Bryant said of the fly-hooked blues, which could strip off 75 yards of line and backing. "We would get them right up to the top and they would go straight down."
"We had three citations that we registered, and I think we had some more that size [16 or more pounds] that we released," said Bain.
Why don't more anglers take advantage of this fishery?
Maybe they are down along the Outer Banks of North Carolina, waiting for these same bluefish to arrive at Nags Head.
by CNB