Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004090028
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Bill Cochran/outdoor editor
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The powerful engine gets a wrench-like grip on the water to thrust Jones' blue, silver-flaked Ranger 370V across Smith Mountain Lake at hat-snatching speed.
It is early morning, the sky is the color of putty and the forecast is for rain the next day. A good time to catch striped bass.
Jones, an angling guide from Vinton, had found fish the evening before. Big and burly, they had moved against the current, pulled by the same response to spring that had the peepers in shrill song and the drake mallards herding protesting hens. The stripers, though, were silent.
"They didn't feed much last night, so they will this morning," Jones promises. He speaks with such conviction that if the bass don't strike you figure it will be their fault, not his.
His first stop is along a wooded bank where the faint imprint of an old logging road lumbers off into the water. Buried for a quarter century, it forms a banquet table where fish move on and off to feed, Jones explains.
"We won't spend a lot of time here, but I like to hit it a time or two. I've caught a lot of fish here."
But not today.
The stripers spotted the evening before are fresh on Jones' mind and they lure him down the lake. Three boats already have gathered where he plans to stop.
A couple of stripers are swirling over the main channel, but Jones turns his back on them and begins casting to the bank.
A fish in the shallows is much more likely to come into contact with your lure than one swirling casually in the middle of the lake, Jones explains.
"What happens, they are pushing shad into the bank. That means he is a very active fish. He is only there for one reason, that is to feed."
When you dwell on the origin of a striped bass, you move a long way toward learning the characteristics of the species, Jones suggests.
The striper is a product of the ocean. He is not a cover-hugging, native species like the black bass. His safety is in deep water. But when the shad go into the shallows on warming water temperatures, he follows them. He forsakes safety to fuel his fast-growing body.
So Jones tosses a bucktail jig to the shallows, dropping it a few feet from the shoreline, the soft whirr of his bait-casting reel moving it slowly.
That's where the first strike comes. Something heavy and strong pops a lure and a graphite rod is nearly ripped from a palming grip.
Jones is elated. The day's first fish always is a sweet one. It can make a day for a guide.
There are some gulls gathering a quarter of a mile down the lake. They are circling and diving, and they have not gone undetected by Jones. Gulls frequently are drawn to marauding packs of striped bass.
But Jones lives by a philosophy: "Never leave fish to find fish."
So he sticks to the bank that has produced a fish.
The gulls gather in even greater numbers. Jones pulls out a pair of binoculars to take a look. His boat companions are silently urging: "Go! Go! Go!"
He goes. The powerful boat eats up the lake rapidly. The wind whistles. The air bites. Ears turn red and threaten to fall off.
"Yeah, boy! They are starting to roll on the surface. Come on babies!" Jones shouts.
A school of stripers is picking off shad one at a time, like a pack of Indians dry-gulching cowboys from rocky crevices. When the action gets hot, the gulls dive in to snatch up the carnage.
Here is the food chain in motion. The shad are feeding on tiny zooplankton, the stripers are feeding on shad. The gulls are feeding on the shad that the stripers kill or disable. The anglers are casting to the stripers.
The striped bass are spooky. After a few casts and a catch, they sound. The gulls are gone, too. They now gather at the spot Jones just left. The lake has become a giant roulette wheel. Where to place your lure next?
"It's called chase," Jones said. "Let's go, boys!"
He heads the boat toward the gulls, cutting the engine in an effort to drift within casting distance of the swirling fish without spooking them.
"If we don't have some crazy running through them, we will be all right," he says.
A crazy approaches. Jones waves his long arms in an effort to slow the boater down. He'd rather share the school than spook it. The crazy slows down, looks at Jones with puzzlement, then waves and heads on up the lake. His wake sends the fish deep.
Stripers feeding over deep water can be difficult to catch. They jet toward the surface, grab a mouthful of shad, then head back down. When you cast to a swirl, you can be casting to a fish that has been there and gone. You may not hook many, but, then, you don't have to wonder where the fish are, either.
"I love it when they break the surface like this," says Jones. "If you can't get excited about that, you can't get excited about much."
You must labor to keep your excitement from causing you to crank your reel too rapidly. Jones recommends a painfully slow retrieve.
"He is going to hit the slowest thing moving."
The biggest striper of the morning is hooked away from the swirls. She hits a jig with a pulverizing jab. When the hook bites into her hard, upper mouth, she heels the rod into a half circle. She has enough bulk to peel line off the reel at will.
In time she tires, losing her grip on the water and reluctantly coming to the surface to expose a large, jagged caudal fin. She is admired, then released. Fifteen - maybe 16 - pounds. Thirty-pounder await.
The swirls come less frequently as the morning ages. The gulls lose interest. Jones isn't as quick to give up. He turns his attention back to the mud banks. But the action is over for the morning.
by CNB