Tuesday Evening

Urban fishing. Gravelly Point. I was trying to hook into striper in the out bound tidal flow. Cold, rainy, lost flies, a huge beaver swimming around me giving signs that "hey man - this is my turf...) and skunk. That's fishing....

Breaking Out the Mark White Lures

I have a stash of these from my last duty station where I was actively fishing an atoll. When I cast them seaward, I felt like a pusher giving out free crack on Halloween - they certainly pulled fish in and thus I treated them like they were made of gold. I finally pulled out one of the smaller ones to give it a whirl on the Potomac. There have been reports of schoolie stripers ganging up on shad during the out going tides at Gravelly Point. I was prospecting with a jighead and gulp minnow hoping to land a few. Then my plan was to shift to the flyrod and have some fun as the fish made runs. It didn't work out that way... I must have cast the jighead/gulp a few hundred times before I changed out the rig to this 1/4 ounce "oama" colored MW Surface Plug. I cast that out a bunch too before calling it quits. In four hours I caught two of these clams. I am debating if this counts as a skunk or not. Don't interpret this as a bad review - these lures are killer - and with zero strikes on the gulp I was throwing, I figured there weren't any fish in the area. The minimum I got out of the time was a good look at the action of these small plugs while reeling them in at different speeds - they produce a ton of bubbles if you reel them in fast, and they surface and "spit" water every other crank or so. You can walk the dog with these as well. And slow jigging produces tons of "oh woe is me - I am hurting and can't swim well - I am worried that a big fish will come along and eat me because of my erratic movement" movement. Multitalented lure if you ask me. Oh well - you can't win all the time...

Gravelly Point Small Mouth

Out going tide. Friday afternoon stall tactic to avoid dense DC traffic. Lots of water draining from the Roaches Run culvert under US-1. I was checking the place out to see if there were any schoolie stripers, but no takers other than this guy. It took the 1" Nymph soft bait pretty close to the shoreline - not in the main current. One fish (no matter how small) is still better than a skunk. The small mouth down in this part of the Potomac (tide section) seem to have much darker coloration. Seems I need to go fishing for more small mouth to do a comparative study...