Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 19, 1990 TAG: 9004200024
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-4 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Bill Cochran
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Snag!" he shouted.
Faron and John Kimak, both from Roanoke County, were trolling on the upper end of Claytor Lake. They were bouncing Bomber lures along the bottom, using a technique called spoonplugging.
"Every once in awhile we would snag," Faron said. "He [Kimak] runs a little 10-horse [power] motor. When we snag, he cuts the engine. I thought I'd snagged again."
Kimak obligingly shifted into reverse.
"It was just dead weight," Faron said. "Then I said, `Whoa!' That is not a snag."
Disgust turns rapidly toward elation when a "snag" suddenly sends tremors of power up your line and into your rod. What Faron had sunk his hooks into was the hard mouth of a muskie that was nearly the length of a pickup-truck bumper.
"We knew it was a good fish," Faron said.
Earlier in the day, Kimak had landed a citation-size, 6-pound, 7-ounce walleye. Not bad for his first fishing effort on the lake.
A newcomer to the region, he had looked over the 4,500-acre Pulaski County impoundment on a previous trip and bought a contour map. Kimak figured the upper end would be the best spot to try. He decided to trace the lake's main channel along the curves of points. Faron had joined him on the outing.
"Trolling, I believe, is a good way to learn new water and cover a lot of water," Kimak said. "In spoonplugging, we do some pretty precision trolling. We can put it [a lure] down there and make it walk the bottom. The whole thing is to control the depth and speed."
The muskie was a battler. When Faron cranked it to the boat, it would dive, recapturing hard-earned line.
"We had 12-pound line," he said. "It wasn't much trouble to get him to the boat, but he kept going for the bottom. He went down three or four times. Finally, I wore him out."
Even with the fish exhausted and on the surface, Faron and Kimak weren't certain what to do with the huge, cavernous mouth that awaited their next move. The fish gave them a contemptuous stare and flashed a forest of teeth. Was it something with which you would share the limited confines of a 12-foot boat?
"We got to laughing about that," Faron said. "We finally got the net on him and he broke the darn net. We grabbed it by the rim and flipped him into the boat. Boy, he was some fish!"
The muskie weighed 32 pounds, 15 ounces and now is safe in Bill Russell's taxidermist shop in the Bennett Springs area.
Spoonpluggers like Kimak are disciples of Buck Perry, a Hickory, N.C., angler who pioneered many of today's structure-fishing techniques.
Perry's theory is this: A fish spends the greater part of its life almost dormant in deep-water areas, leaving such sanctuaries a time or two daily to move into shallower water to feed. You catch the good ones when you control the depth and speed of your lure on or around the bottom structures that the fish uses for cover when moving from deep to shallow.
Even though Perry is a Southerner, his greatest following has been in the North, where Kimak once lived.
"I belonged to a spoonplugging club near Pittsburgh," he said. "I just started fishing in '76. We didn't have bass clubs and competition. We just shared knowledge and fishing spots."
He'd like to see more of that around here. Particularly in behalf of the elusive walleye, which he has been catching at Carvins Cove.
"What I have thought about doing is finding others who are interested in walleye and just getting together in some kind of club format and see what we can do for walleye fishing down here."
\ OTHER CATCHES: Mark Clingenpeall of Roanoke used cut carp to catch two Smith Mountain striped bass that weighed 31 pounds, 1 ounce and 21 pounds, 8 ounces.
Good numbers of striped bass are being landed in the tailrace of Kerr Dam. Brush piles of Kerr Lake are loaded with hand-size crappie. The fishing hot spot of the state could be Lake Anna, where stripers, largemouth bass and crappie are keeping fishermen busy.
by CNB