MKFS: Fishing Conditions Archive

June 5

Fishing continues to be good to excellent on the upper Potomac. Despite very windy conditions and cool temperatures in a high-pressure system, we took about twenty nice smallmouth and as many dinks (and lost thirty more at boatside!) Dahlberg divers, small poppers, Butch Minnows, and smaller streamers and clouser minnows are the ticket for flyrodders, and Zoom Flukes, buzzbaits, and grubs are producing for the spin guys. The deeper your lure goes in the water column, the darker it should be.

The Shenandoah is running clear and low; the Potomac is low but has bit of a dingy stain, perhaps from algae or other biological growth.

Time of day is critical. With low water levels and increasing temps, most fish are laying up in the midday. They'll eat, but only lures presented slowly and deeply. Ken Penrod recommended tubes but I found a 1/4 oz jig-and-pig combination (the smallmouth variety is a hair or kraft-fur jig and a Zoom tiny salty chunk) to be a better offering from a drifting boat--gets down, stays down, and can be fished in any direction. Tubes are the most effective when falling, and it takes a skilled spin angler to fish a "falling" bait consistently. The jig-and-pig works well falling, swimming, just sitting there, or crawling the bottom.

Brown or half-and-half smoke grubs fished across large gravel or chunk-rock flats delivered several good fish even when the fishing was slow in midday, including one walleye of about 17".

Bottom composition seemed to be the key on Saturday. Typically in summer we find some smallies--and some big ones--in larger soft-water holds, such as the big pools behind ledges we call Lefty's Hole and Catfish Hole. Lately those areas have been empty of fish, perhaps because their bedrock and sand bottoms are silty and devoid of forage.

Productive areas were mixed-composition bottom, with chunk rock down to gravel the most effective. Cleaner bottom usually looks darker. Fish were also related to the deepest parts of the river structure. In some areas that was mid-river, where large obstructions in fast water create long, deep "streaks" of softer water. In ledge systems, fish were congregated in the tails of pools, especially up against the obstructions of the next ledge in the Weverton and Knoxville areas. This is a bit counter to the usual wisdom: Fish always hold tight to the obstruction that stops the water.

Until 4 PM Saturday we had many--perhaps hundreds--of strikes, with only fifteen or twenty hookups, nearly all of them on the outside of the mouth or just barely in the front of the lip. This was frustrating but most of the lightly hooked fish were small. The eight or ten grownup fish we caught before 4 PM were well-hooked. I always wonder how they all know how to do the same thing.

At about 4 PM the fish became active. We took a dozen or so up to 18", then a handful more on topwater drifting through Brunswick Pool. The hot spots were long, deep river channel areas adjacent to good bottom. Best presentation was slow and almost distracted (our best fish struck when the angler was trying to tease out a snarl in his line.) Later a steadily retrieved buzzbait outperformed the usual topwater suspects.

Large mats of star grass are beginning to appear in the usual areas. Some are already joining and creating soft-water areas on their own, especially behind the fish weir at Old Mill and in the top of Brunswick Pool. It has been two full seasons since we've had emergent vegetation of any sort in our stretch of the river. When it's extensive it usually marks good fishing and can offset the bad effects of very low water.

Bald eagles are active; the eaglet is loud but invisible so far. Night herons, kingfishers, and green herons, as well as dozens of great blues if you count their constantly talking offspring, still standing on nests.

Also evident is a lot of bad behavior on the part of tubers on the upper stretch, between the Needles and Potoma Landing. On Saturday, large groups of lashed-together idiots giggled, whooped, and wandered all over the river, chumming a trail of beer cans and profanity. I almost brained the beermeister with a ten-foot Carlyle oar--or perhaps "struck in the head" would be a better phrase. One consolation: a twenty-to-thirty knot headwind tended to scatter them and made progress downriver difficult, so maybe they won't come back. I propose that the Maryland DNR begin feeding a special pond full of young tiger muskies on the special Purina Musky Chow that comes in small pink human-finger-shaped chunks. The problem will take care of itself.

On an only slightly more serious note, tubers have been more than just annoying lately. I have seen dozens of examples of truly dangerous behavior. Some shuttle outfits are being reckless. I have seen:

large numbers of teenagers with very little experience on the water with too few adults mixed in--run them through a class III rapid and you have a scared and scattered mess
groups of people with no idea where the takeout is. Considering that there is a four mile stretch of empty river with very limited access below the 340 bridge, that is a recipe for a cold lost night on the river.
lots of people with no shoes, lost shoes, or inappropriate shoes.
numerous drunken and even threatening people, including one that one of our guides called the cops on and one I saw who was drifting, passed out, half a mile below the takeout and behind an island in the most remote area possible. The client had to repeatedly shake him and yell at him to make sure he wasn't dead already. Later he climbed out of the river into a large poison ivy patch, and we could track his progress through the stinging nettles by his yelps and curses.
Two women, obviously terrified, trapped and frozen in heavy flow on the last outcrop above Whitehorse Rapids. One had lost her tube, the other her shoes.
Children as young as six years old
People tied together with long ropes
Numerous people without their lifejackets on, including many who wore them in partial fashion, including one enterprising young man who had it tied around his leg.

Luckily, this foolishness seems to be worst over Memorial Day and declines in the course of the summer.

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