I love this time of year because I don’t have to put up with dinks and panfish worrying my bait to death and me and my fishing buddies from the Potomac River Smallmouth Club generally start having entire stretches, miles even, of river all to ourselves. Most fishermen pack it in after the leaves come off the trees. If you need any kind of jacket It’s too cold  for them.  And  they can’t  go out and catch fish after fish, nope time to watch football and tie flies and hunt as far as they’re concerned.  But late fall and winter is when the ‘big girls’  come out to play.  Big Muskies are really active this time of year. I just saw a series of 7 pictures on one the fishing boards I frequent  of 7 Muskies caught on the Susquehanna river in PA….all caught  ON THE SAME DAY. Fish of 10,000 casts my BUTT! Not up on the Susqy apparently. Plus, big smallmouth become more the norm, instead of the occasional. Big smallies have to eat all winter, at least once or twice a day if they can. Maintaining body mass once you reach 17+ demands it. You may fish all day for one or 2 bites but more often than not, it’s gonna be a pig if you can manage to stay focused and alert for that sometimes very gentle tap. But just a couple of things to go over with ya before we hit that under 60 degree water in the Shenandoah this time of year:

If you’re fishing thru the winter, please be smart about it. I’ve lost some very good cyber-fishing, and real-life friends, because they thought they were tougher than the winter-time outdoors, or forgot to do some very basic preparations.  I think first and foremost..do not go alone when the water gets cold. A buddy to help bail you out of trouble when the “S.H.T.F.” (you can figure it out) is the most important piece of gear you’ll have with you. I actually chose these guys carefully as well. I want experienced guys that I know I can count on when things “go south” if you know what I mean. A full change of clothes, extra food, PFD ; worn, not stashed in the fwd hatch of the Coosa please, goes without saying. When my partners are safe…that helps ME stay safe as well. For us here in the Shenandoah Valley, there is no end to the fishing season. We fish right thru the year, breaking thru the thin ice along the banks on occasion. But we pick our days very carefully…Good weather, checked and double checked thru the day (I LOVE my smart phone for this), calm, normal water levels, and a water temp/air temp total of as close to 100 as we can get it. ex: a 45 degree day needs to have 55 degree water to equal 100. We’ll allow a few points below, depending on where we’re going and the conditions but not much less than that.

Winter is NOT the time to try and improve your paddling skills. If you’re on a river, pick nice gentle floats. Now is not the time of year to tackle that squirrely class III you’ve been thinking about. Keep it short too. 3-4 miles is about all you’re gonna want be out there anyway. Paddle thru the shallow, ledgy  water and concentrate on the deeper pools with structure. As nice, wide stable boat is a plus too. Might wanna put that seat in the low position in the Coosa and stay seated for the day., just to make me feel better.

Now…big smallmouth Bass will be feeding all winter long. They’re in their ‘winter holes” up north now…they are headed in that direction down here. We’re fishing deeper water near current with good structure and plenty of ‘groceries’ that we already know are there from summer observations. We’ve only got about 3 weeks of this left. After that, we’ll be concentrating on the winter holes that we know.  Right now, Jerkbaits and slow-rolled spinners are still being taken. But soon, we’ll be using Jig and Pigs, slow crawled over rocks and ledges into deep pockets, and Tubes ‘dead-sticked’ on the bottom. And by dead stick…I mean DEAD. Al Pugh of Yamamoto baits calls it his “3 cookie rule”…I called it (when I was a smoker) my 1 cigarette rule: leaving the bait absolutely unmolested, once you take up the slack in your line, for the length of time it would take you to eat 3 homemade cookies…or …smoke a cigarette. And even then…leave it some more. That 20+ smallie heard and saw your bait hit the water, and he watched it sink, and he knows where it landed, this is HIS hole. He knows it’s there. But he also knows that moving too quickly may ‘spook it’ if it’s food. Be patient, big smallies are inherently curious and aggressive fish. They have to be or they don’t eat or get to spawn… he’ll come after it when he’s ready. And when it is time to move it (after 3-5 minutes minimum) Move it only very slightly…just a quick squeeze of the rod in your hand will make the bait ‘quiver’ down there. That may be all he needs to galvanize him into action. Remember, about the only difference with this technique between cat fishing in summer, and winter fishing for big smallmouth is the bait; one is made of meat, the other isn’t.

Finally, I recently bought a small JetBoil stove and tried it out at a lunch stop last weekend. It’s small enough to fit in a medium sized lunch bag but make sure it’s in its own dry-bag, along with your fire-starting material. It’s well worth the price in order to have a hot lunch on the shore in cold weather with no trouble at all. This little gizmo has now become part of my “must carry” winter gear. It’s almost worth the price to watch your float partner’s faces as you savor some hot beef stew, or soup for lunch, and then fire up a big cuppa Folger’s coffee afterwards.

Well, I missed posting last month (I know I know..BAD pro-staffer) But not due to lack of fishing but due to lack of time mostly. It was very busy last month, with some non-fishing related side-trips to NC for Mom’s birthday, some quality “G-Pa time” among other things. And it also seems like on the last few fishing trips I was offered the front seat of a very good friend’s 2 man ODC1220 that he has upgraded with some Maxxon bags and electric motor. Let me tell you..it’s one sweet ride and VERY easy to fish out of.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love being in my kayaks and especially my Coosa, but if you understand one thing about me it is this: I am essentially a lazy man…and if someone wants me to play ‘hood ornament’ on a 2 man pontoon boat and row my fat butt around for a day of fishing..I am so there baby. But… what that does do is free up the Coosa to be test driven by some of my fishing buddies who’ve been eyeing my new boat with a mixture of curiosity and envy. Usually the first question I get is can *I* execute a 360 jump and stick the landing. I usually tell them that’s a copy-righted circus act and only one Drew Gregory is permitted to do it…mostly ’cause he’s NUTS. But anyway…I’ve been playing ‘car salesmen’ by letting a couple different guys use my Coosa for the day on trips. I really think you need to spend an entire day in the Coosa to get a real feel for the boat. It feels very diffrent from anything else I’ve been in before and I think a full days ‘butt-time’ is needed to fully appreciate it vs a quick paddle around the put in or take out.  Both of my friends were impressed, but Pete found out the same thing I did last month; big guys, with lots of gear and ’technical level’ water and the Coosa mix. But that didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for it. Both were impressed with it’s mild manners, it’s handling and stability and ease of getting into and out of the boat.  John spent three quarters of his day in the Coosa with the seat in the high position, being impressed at how it improves your overall field of vision. He’s normally in a ‘Ride’ or on the front seat of the aforementioned mutual friend’s ODC, so a comment like that is high praise indeed. Both are now seriously considering purchases. I’ve also been trying to get up with a friend and co-worker of my son’s who recently purchased a Coosa. He lives close by and we’re both trying to work out a mutual day float somewhere on the south fork the Shenandoah, which for no other reason,  should make for some cool pictures…dual Coosa’s on the Doah!

But yesterday, I was back in the Coosa on the Potomac River just below Harper’s Ferry. This has got to be one of the most spectacular rivers to paddle and fish on the east coast. The Potomac is mild and easy most of the time, but no doubt everyone has seen photos and films of Great Falls down nearer Washington DC when the Potomac is at flood stage. What most people don’t understand is that it doesn’t take much rain to get the Potomac to that stage given the size of the Potomac River watershed, and don’t forget, the Shenandoah also feeds the P’mac at Harper’s Ferry as well. With all the rain we’ve had this Spring, the Potomac has been running high, hard and muddy for most of the time since March. But she’s finally back in her banks, and flowing gentle and wide again and some my fellow Potomac River Smallmouth clubbers wanted to do VA Wayside to Burnswick MD.

VA Wayside is the name of a small parking lot next to the RT 340 bridge that connects VA with MD on the upstream side. It’s a long steep hill to get to the bottom of the put in, but it’s usually well worth the effort, if for the scenery if nothing else. The river is wide and basically a big rock garden here and for the next 3.5 miles downstream. The big boulders sticking up everywhere generally hold fish behind every one of them. Deep pools are strewn here and there that also hold smallies, big catfish, and even the occasional Walleye or Muskie, although we would encounter no toothy critters this day. About half a mile downriver of the bridge, a large VA side island holds more Great Blue Heron and now, Bald Eagle nests than you have every seen in one place. During the early spring nesting season, the noise the Herons kick up in early spring can be almost deafing.  Bald Eagles usually don’t nest so close together, but this island is too good to pass up, being large and densely covered with many tall primary growth trees, they’ve scaled back territorial claims in order share this prime nesting spot. The Herons are pretty much done for the year as far as their nesting goes, but eagles are preparing their young to leave the nesting area in the next couple of weeks. On this particular day I would see 3 different adults and 4 juvenile bald eagles. Once I saw what looked like a fledgling getting a flying lesson from his parent. On the MD side, just across from the end of the “rookery island”, I ground out to fish a weed bed for a bit. There was small channel that had been cut next to the bank and a blow-down tree blocked any access to it. I stopped fishing for a moment to get some water from my hydration pack, looked around and a young juvenile eagle was sitting on the blow-down just watching me, not 50 yards away. Click on the picture and look close, he’s right where the smaller branch comes out of the top of the tree.  Apparently he was wondering why we pitiful humans needed a stick to catch fish. Personally speaking, I just might trade my ‘sticks’ for 4 inch talons and the ability to fly!

It got a little warm yesterday, but not blisteringly hot like it’s been for the past 3 days which we were thankful for. We started the day with a little cloud cover and that kept the fish lively and active for the first couple or three hours. Seemed like every boulder and ledge held a fish or 2 behind it …and sometimes you hit pay dirt. I grounded the Coosa on a mid river submerged rock and fished a boulder just upstream of me for a good thirty minutes with good sucess with 10-12 inch fish. When I pulled out a 14 and then a 16 incher..that seemed to be the last of them. I guess those that were left finally figured out that the watermelon-green fluke with the black flake wasn’t real after all. As hard as I tried, they didn’t want a spinner bait either. Had a couple of short strikes early on but that was it for the spinner baits. When the cloud cover moved away things slowed down as you could expect and the fishing cooled off a bit. The pattern remained the same but you had to get down deeper to find the fish.

To this point there had been no real test for the Coosa as far as “lumpy water” goes. 340 to Brunswick is mostly straight-line chutes over the ledges, but there is one good one…Knoxville Falls. It’s about a 4 foot change in elevation over 40 yards at the end of a sharp VA-side ridge that ends at the river. This was a big obstacle to riverboat traffic back in the day and the remains of a lock are still standing on the MD side that once was part of the C&O canal. It’s now silted over and 2 centuries worth of flooding have washed out the MD side in front of the lock,  so at Saturday’s levels you just had a long slope with a class 1.5 ‘chop’ for the 40 yards.  It does curve to the right a bit at the end but otherwise, no worries for the Coosa. I figured this was the smarter way to go given the slightly lower gage levels making the chutes thru midriver a tad steeper than I cared to tackle. The incident on the mid-VA river last month also pointed up another problem I needed to fix…too much gear. I’ve always been a ‘more is more’ kind of fishing guy. But on a Kayak… that’s not neccessarily the case. As I’ve already said, too often we carry every bait we own, and throw 3 different baits all day long, rather than taking a little time to think about conditions, type of fish we intend to target, time of year and likely water levels and then carrying just what we think we’ll need. Yesterday, I knew smallmouth were the target of choice, we may have some cloud cover and water would mostly likely be green in color. That told me, given it’s late spring, I should carry flukes, spinners and cranks and maybe a few tubes. And that was it…that’s all I had with me. I threw the cranks for a bit under the clouds, but after the sun was out, packed them way in the forward hatch. The flukes turned out to be the key and I stuck with them almost all day except for slinging a spinnerbait in the deep pools and flatwater on occasion. Everything else, including the tubes stayed in their boxes under the seat, at my feet or in the front hatch. One note of suggestion: I would recommend that you switch over to the type of lure/terminal tackle storage boxes that have the gasket seals and wide bar-type latches on them. The Coosa can be a wet ride just like any sit on top. You may feel dryer sitting in the higher premium seat, but you’re still shipping water over the sides and through the scuppers when the water starts getting up to class I  and above. When I got to the bottom of Knoxville Falls and eddied out to fish the back side of the ledges at the bottom of the ‘Falls’ , I encountered the first jet boats from Brunswick. The base of  Knoxville Falls is a favorite destination for these guys and marks the furthest point upriver you can get unless you have the skills to negotiate the MD side open slope…few do. Although I do know one guy, who’s a fellow Potomac River Smallmouth Club member who does it regularly. The ‘pucker-factor” when riding with him is quite high to say the least.

After picking up a few fish along the Falls, it’s mostly flatwater down to the takeout under the RT 15 bridge at Brunswick. But there are some deep pockets here and there that hold some very big smallmouth. Fish in the 21, 22, and even 23 inch range are not unheard of in this stretch, but they are elusive and hard to find unless you spend a lot of time on the Potomac and work at learning the river. The Potomac is almost a quarter mile wide along here and there’s a LOT of places to hide a trophy smallie. It pays to have some paddling skills and be willing to work at finding them in order to be sucessful. We had a particular time we wanted to be at the take out so we paddled out the last half mile or so, fishing here and there when we found a drop off and a submerged boulders. I even managed a 3 lb channel cat off the backside of one rock. Never caught a kitty on a fluke before, but hey, they’re predators just like a smallie is so why not.

Yeah, it was good to be back in saddle again. Now remind me… I gotta pick up a couple more of those gasket-top boxes…

With all the rain we’ve had here in the mid-Atlantic, finding floatable water, let alone FISHable water, is on a scale of 1 to 10…about 35 right now. Last weekend virtually EVERY stream in the state was out of its banks…except one. We knew it would be okay due to it’s location, it’s surrounding geography, and it’s small watershed area, so that’s where we headed. It’s a great little stream, about one good cast in width from bank to bank and great fishing when the smallies are co-operating.

A nice little 15 incher

And you can easily have a multi-species  day on this flow. This particular day we caught 6 different species of fish, 3 different types of black bass alone.

What will immediately be obvious to some is that I attach no name to this little flow. It does have a name, but we choose not to use it when we write about it. It’s a small flow, with VERY limited access, and even those access points and the river itself are small and it could be easily overwhelmed and very quickly be over-fished if it became a more popular destination. Virginia people will probably be able to figure out where we were if you are at all familiar with this little jewel of a stream just by my descriptions of its fish population.  As you can see, this truly is an absolute gem of river. There is no development to speak of on this float, no houses backed up to the river, no pastures or farms, no railroads …or any other kind roads anywhere close to this float. Save for 2 or 3 bridge crossings where you can put in and take out, you will encounter only a single camping lot someone owns with a rope swing…that’s it. That’s all the ‘civilization’ you will encounter. You glide along surrounded by nothing but nature’s serenity and your fishing companions, and in the early Spring here in VA, this little river is hard to beat.

I’d love to be able to say it was perfect day…but 3 dumps and a pin kinda ruined it for a couple of us with lost gear and busted rods. The river gods extracted a heavy price this day. But the good news is, we were never in serious danger, everyone kept their sense of humor and I even learned a little something about myself, and the Coosa in particular. The dump wasn’t a function of the boat having a flaw of any kind, the flaw was in the operator. I have a tendency to ‘push the envelope’ sometimes, and when I’m in a new boat I generally like to know what she’s capable of.  This particular float is dead at 9 miles long, with a good number of class II chutes and one particularly long class I/II shoal that really makes you pay attention. So of course, this float was the perfect time to push the Coosa a little bit and see

Pete checking the eddys and seam-lines at mid flow

what she ‘gots’. She has a lot, let me tell ya, but… I tried to make it do something it really wasn’t designed to do; run technical, class II/III water, loaded down with a 230 lb guy and about 50 lb of gear. If all I had to worry about was running straight chutes and wave trains that would be one thing but that much gear piled up behind me and then ME in the seat, shifts the CG of this boat to well above the water line and I forgot about that. Well, I’m still a newbie to sit-on-tops…give me a break! I’m used to my sit-in boats where my butt, and most of my gear mass are located either at, or below, the waterline. Plus having the extra support at my hips, and knees in contact with the upper deck of the sit-in boat gives me much more control. The Coosa has no hip restraint or thigh straps, so I couldn’t make the back-end of the Coosa scoot around like I can my other boat. A good hip snap, one way or the other coupled with a strong sweep of the paddle and I could swing the back end of my Loon around almost as easily as I can move the front of the Coosa. Not having that option makes those 90 degree turns that are required in one of rapids on this float kinda hard to execute.  In the final analysis: The Coosa is still IMHO the best sit on top I have ever paddled, but it does have its limitations as the water gets more technical and squirrely due to not having some of the control you have in other boats.  Also…do NOT overload it in this kind of water. You’re asking for trouble. I’ll be paring down the gear for my future trips as you can well imagine. We all carry tons of stuff with us every time we go and then maybe…MAYBE …throw 3 baits all day long. I’ll be giving more thought to what I carry in the future. Another good  thing I learned out of all this: if you manage to get the Coosa ‘pinned’, you can easily get it unpinned if you can lift the low side high enough to clear the scupper

Mat with a nice 3 lb LMB

holes above the waterline, the large scupper holes on the Coosa, coupled with the hydraulic action of the water flowing underneath creates a suction that pulls the water out of the boat very quickly and you’re floating again in just a matter of seconds.  Finally:  the milk-crate Yak Cart I made down in the basement needs a little rework. It’s way too high and narrow to use on a rough portage. The Coosa needs to be lower to the ground and the wheels further apart. I’ll need to think on that one for a bit…but rest assured…I WILL come up with something…my fellow yak fishing buddies don’t call me the ‘rocket surgeon’ for nuthin! Final tally for the day was one lost (inexpensive) fishing rig, one busted rig, my 4200 box of spinner baits gone (it was FULL…ouch) and my 3600 box of jerk baits…including 4 Lucky Crafts …gone(*sniff*) and one cracked St. Croix Premier butt end that’s easily fixed down in the basement.

One quick note about safety here:  I don’t get in a kayak without a PFD on. I was very glad I had one on Sunday. Given air

At the Fall-line

 and water temps, hypothermia was not an issue…but had either one been 5 degrees cooler, or we had had more of a breeze, it might have been, and I was just very glad my head (and hair) remained dry, thanks to the PFD.  Another personal rule of mine is wearing quick-dry clothing at all times (NO cotton). I was basically dry in about 30 minutes. But I forgot one critical point…one should not wear cotton underwear either! …word to the wise.

Now where DID I put that UnderArmor?