Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 23, 1995 TAG: 9502230041
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But you know how tenacious angling optimism can be - just one more cast, one more troll across a certain point, one more dunk of the bait and the big one might strike.
This time, it did.
``Jerry decided to hit this one last place where he had tried a couple of years ago, and sure enough, there he was,'' Rogers said.
It was a she, actually, a 45-pound, 10-ounce striped bass that is expected to go into the Virginia record book.
The fish was hooked about one-sixteenth of a mile inside Kilowatt Creek on the upper Blackwater River arm of the lake, Rogers said. The anglers had maneuvered their bass boat into the creek and dropped off three trolling lines near where muddy and clear water met. Then they started slow-trolling live shad, moving along the shoreline headed toward the lake's main channel.
``We were getting pretty close to calling it quits,'' Rogers said. ``We were fixing to get them up.''
Rogers had a 6-inch shad on his line behind a side planer that was keeping the bait about 10 feet deep along the mud line. When the shad crossed a point near a dock, Rogers' rod bowed.
``I figured I might have hung into something,'' he said.
Then the planer flipped to the surface and 20-pound line started peeling from his reel.
``I knew I had a big fish on,'' Rogers said. ``I didn't know he was over 40 [pounds]. I knew he was around 30 or 35.''
Bigger, anyway, than the 25-pounder he had landed at Smith Mountain a couple of seasons ago.
``He took off toward deep water in the middle of the channel. I had to reel him in, then he peeled some more line off, then I would reel him back and he would peel some more off.''
It was the kind of arm-wrenching display that had hooked Rogers on striper fishing in the first place.
``The power of these fish, the ocean instincts that they have ... they are just eating machines. If they had teeth they would be dangerous,'' he said.
The tug of war lasted about 20 minutes. Each time Rogers reeled the fish back toward the boat his confidence grew.
``I realized that I had him pretty well hooked,'' he said. ``It was just a matter of time.''
The landing net that had appeared to be plenty big earlier in the day suddenly was dwarfed by the fish, but Kirkman managed to stuff about half of its bulk inside the net and heave it aboard.
The time was 5:30 p.m.
``We had digital scales,'' Rogers said. ``We hooked him to them and tried to pull him off the deck, which we couldn't. He was so heavy. I saw the scales tip up to 43 and I would say from his back fin on down still was hanging on the deck. We hadn't got the full weight of him.''
The silver sides of the fish were tinged with pinks, purples and lavenders. It wasn't ghost white, like a fish out of a deep-water wintering area; rather it appeared to have been feeding in the shadows for some time where it had colored up, Rogers said.
``She probably had about 4 pounds of eggs in her,'' he said.
Rogers and Kirkman started reeling in their other lines to head for Magnum Point Marine, where there is a set of state-inspected scales large enough to weigh such a fish. When Rogers grabbed his second rod, there was a fish on it, but he lost that one.
``I think it was a big one, too,'' he said.
At the marina, Rogers' striper weighed 12 ounces more than the current state record, which was landed July 7, 1992, by Gary Tomlin of Buena Vista. A biologist who examined Rogers' fish estimated it was about 17 years old.
Information on the catch is in the hands of the record committee of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. Rogers' name should show up in the record book in about three weeks.
by CNB