There’s More than One Way to Catch a Big Fish
If you’re a Chesapeake Bay angler, the most important day of 2015 came on Saturday, April 18, the opening day of fishing for rockfish and the start of the trophy season.
Rockfish, or striped bass to the world outside of the Bay, are a migratory fish. Most of the linesides that swim the Atlantic seaboard originate here in the Chesapeake, but the females and a fair portion of the males don’t reside in the Bay for long.
At about age four these fish leave for a migratory life in the Atlantic, where they grow to much larger sizes. Once in the ocean they swim the coast, sometimes as far north as Nova Scotia and as far south as South Carolina.
They return to the Bay only once each year, in spring, to spawn. Catches of striped bass over 100 pounds have been recorded in the distant past by commercial netters; today a 60-pounder is big news — and a mighty big fish.
Trolling big lures through Bay waters gives boat anglers the best chance of scoring on the giant fish. Since arriving in the Bay from the ocean and heading for their natal waters, they are constantly on the move, never staying in one place for long until they at last arrive at the headwaters of their birth. After spawning, the big females return to the ocean. The big males stick around until the females stop arriving. Then they too return to the ocean, the last of them departing by early May.
Lures to Catch Big Fish
Big lead-headed jigs are the most popular lure to troll in the Bay, especially when nine- to 12-inch soft-bodied plastic shad are added.
Included in this category are variations like parachute jigs with flaring skirts of nylon hair, the original natural bucktail hair jigs and simple nylon hair-skirted jigs. Often rigged in tandem, they are included in just about all trolling setups.
These ersatz baitfish are crafted to emulate in both size and color the menhaden, a favorite food of striped bass. Also called bunker, mossbunker, alewife and pogy, these baitfish reach sizes of up to three pounds. Generally found in schools, the swimming baitfish can appear silver, chartreuse, gold, yellow, purple, green and lavender.
Big spoons are also popular. Available in more colors and sizes than you can imagine, they are also known for producing a significant portion of the really big stripers boated during this springtime season.
Arrays intended to represent whole schools of baitfish also attract big stripers. These include umbrella rigs, displaying as many as 10 lures (without hooks, by law) on wire arms like an umbrella. One lure with hooks is tied in the center and a bit more distant. Chandeliers are similar but have additional rings of lures and resemble (of course) a chandelier. Daisy chains are in-line attractors that have any number of sequenced lures, usually soft-bodied shad, spinner blades, tufts of hair or shiny tinsel arrayed on one central line with the last lure in the series bearing the hook.
All of these lures have but one objective: to trigger a strike from a giant ocean-running rockfish.
This year the limit is one fish. It can be either from 28 to 36 inches or over 40 inches.
This regulation was put in place to protect the population of big females of a particular age class. Females of this size can carry upward of a half-million eggs and are critical to the rebuilding of rockfish stocks oceanwide.
Conservation Note
With the opening of rockfish season, Maryland Department of Natural Resources urges anglers to use a new website and smartphone app — www.chesapeakecatch.com —
to record their catch and share data about Chesapeake Bay sport fish needed to make informed management decisions.