Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 5, 1993 TAG: 9307070445
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BILL COCHRAN OUTDOOR EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"I am fishing with the biggest gizzard shad that I can get - 10- to 12-inch shad if I can get them," said Coley, who operates a taxidermy shop in Julian, N.C.
During a recent week, Coley caught a 40-pound, 2-ounce striper on a Monday. The following Wednesday, one angler he was guiding landed a fish that weighed 24 pounds, 10 ounces and another landed one that weighed 26 pounds, 10 ounces. Two days later, his fishing partner got a 29-pound, 9-ounce striper. All the fish were weighed at Magnum Point Marina.
It wasn't just a fluke week, either. During a week in April, his boat accounted for stripers that weighed 35 pounds, 7 ounces; 32 pounds, 5 ounces; and 24 pounds.
While many of the Smith Mountain regulars have been calling the 1993 striper season an off year, Coley, who has fished the lake for 15 years, sees it differently.
"I've had one of the best years I've ever had, both in numbers and size of fish," he said.
He believes the cool, wet spring kept the surface temperatures down and extended the peak of the fishing.
It is when the temperatures begin to get frying-pan hot that Coley turns to the largest shad he can find for bait.
"You take in hot weather, the fish are real active and it takes a lot to keep them going," Coley said. "And big fish are lazy, anyway, they don't want to chase down small fish."
Using a big shad for bait also eliminates having to deal with small stripers.
"The smaller fish will chase it and they may hit it, but they can't get it in their mouths," Coley said.
Coley uses hefty tackle to match the fury of the big game he stalks: 7-foot Shakespeare Ugly Sticks and 6500 Ambassadeur reels wound with 20-pound Trilene Big Game line. Even so, he wondered if he was in control when the 40-pounder began to peel line from his reel.
"We were on a good school of fish. It was about 8:30 Monday morning," he recalled. "We had already caught probably five stripers. I had caught a 19-pounder.
"I had just rebaited and got the bait out - a shad about a foot long - and I was holding the rod when the big one hit."
It lacked 4 pounds, 12 ounces of matching the state record, a Smith Mountain striper landed last July by Gary Tomlin of Buena Vista.
Locating schools of striped bass is the key to catching fish, and Coley knows this species is going to be near its food supply.
"Right now we are finding them in small, secondary, deep-water coves, where the striped bass can corner the big schools of shad," he said.
Coley likes to be there at daylight because the fish are going to head for deeper water shortly after the sun pushes above the horizon. A second peak occurs when the shadows lengthen across the lake the final hour of light in the early evening.
Living two hours from the lake adds to the challenge of keeping up with the stripers, a species that will rapidly change its habitat as dictated by the calendar, the temperature, the light level and the location of forage fish. Coley gets help by sharing information with a fellow North Carolina guide, Ken Dempsey, whose boat accounted for a striper weighing more than 44 pounds in April.
"If I'm not up there, he is." Coley said.
The guiding business started for Coley as a spinoff of his taxidermy work. People would come into his shop and talk fishing, and when they learned of his success at Smith Mountain, they'd want to tag along.
"You can't take everybody for free," he said.
Coley uses two bait-fishing methods: free-lining and balloon fishing. Free-lining involves putting a shad 60 to 75 feet behind a boat and fishing it without weight while working points with a trolling motor. The second technique is much the same, except a balloon is attached to the line about eight feet above the bait to control its depth.
Hot weather is about to take a toll on fishing success, Coley believes. High water temperatures put the squeeze on the stripers' comfort zone, that band of cool, oxygenated water called the thermocline.
"The water is heating up quickly and I think the free-lining and the balloon fishing is going to be pretty much over," he said. "I am going to say that the last half of October it will start picking back up."
The lull will give Coley time to catch up on his taxidermy work, and that includes mounting the 40-pounder he landed.
by CNB