Summer Out; Fall Enters
This past week was the last taste of summer and the fishing was excellent. Tuesday brought in autumn and now a transition will happen fast.
The water will clear and the perch will flee the creeks to the deep holes in the rivers. Rockfish will school up in the rivers and start working down to the bay. Huge schools of bait fish will be forced from the creeks and the stripers will feast. Rockfish will be breaking on top and birds will gather to eat the scraps.
Bernie Shea's parties out of Solomons are getting their limits of fall run stripers.
Trollers of bucktails and paddle tail jigs in tandems will find plenty of action in the breakers. Lure casters and jiggers can drift into the action and have lots of fun on light tackle.
Plenty of perch now in the deeper holes of the Patuxent.
The catfish in the Potomac are huge and easy to catch with fresh alewife for bait. The region from Nanjemoy to Indian Head and Fort Washington is loaded with fish in excess of 50 pounds. They are eating the Asiatic clams from the Arkendale Flats. So, we have one invasive species eating another. The blue cats are pervasive all the way down to Cobb Island.
Roy Bradfield is scoring huge catfish like this 68 pounder in the Potomac near Nanjemoy on the Arkendale flats. The big ones get away, no kidding.
The spot were still active in the mouth of the Patuxent last Saturday, but they have thinned out and the remainder will probably head out on this cold front coming early this week. Bottom fishermen found plenty of white perch in the 25 to 40 foot edges.
Robert LeGrande caught this fine rockfish from the shore at Cedar Point on that surface lure.
High tides found the stripers hitting lures cast from the shoreline at Cedar Point and in the creek mouths in the Patuxent. There are puppy drum and slot reds still available; a forty-pound bull redfish took a trolled bucktail meant for stripers off Cedar Point late last week. The reds will swim for the Atlantic when the bay temperature drops below 60 degrees which is predicted within the next ten days.
Josh Fife shows a 5 1/2 pound bass from a farm pond. He uses one of those new- fangled rigs, a bobber and a live minnow.
The rockfish season ends on December tenth this year in Maryland waters one per day with a minimum of 19 inches and a Maximum of 31 inches. The Potomac season lasts until December 31 and allows two per day, minimum 20 inches and maximum 31 inches.