Global warming is real and it has affected fishing

I know there are some folks who don’t believe in global warming, but it is not a religion, it is a scientific fact, and I know it’s true because I have seen the results. I can understand a coal miner in West Virginia not wanting to see his way of life and livelihood disappear, but that is going to happen. The oil industry is also going away.

I grew up in Claymont, and everybody I knew worked in the steel, oil or chemical industries. None of those plants exist today. Because of those plants, the Delaware River was an open sewer, and there was a pollution barrier that blocked all aquatic life from Wilmington north. Today, shad and striped bass run up the Delaware into Pennsylvania.

As a fisherman for the better part of 75 years, I have seen the effects of a warming ocean. My first experience with this was in 1989 when I moved to Virginia Beach to be the first executive director of the Coastal Conservation Association of Virginia. At the time, Claude Bain was the director of the Virginia Citation Program, and he was getting reports of big schools of spadefish around the islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. These were new arrivals from southern waters, and fishermen could not get them to eat regular baits or lures, so they used the Eastern Shore Mirr-O-Lure. That is a big treble hook with a weight molded in the center. Very effective, but not really sporting.

Claude got in touch with fishermen to the south and found out they used small bits of clam drifted back in a clam chum slick. The rods were placed in holders, and when they bent double you picked them up and cranked in the fish. The reason you put the rods in a holder is because the spadefish tapped the bait many times before taking the hook.

Spadefish were just one species that had moved up to Virginia. Triggerfish were another, and catching them was a good deal easier than the spades. Triggers were found over wrecks, and once you got their attention with a chum bag full of chopped-up clam, it was Katy bar the door. They too were a new species that came up from the south on warm water.

By the time I moved back to Delaware in 2000, spadefish and triggerfish were moving here as well. I have caught both in Delaware, but find most anglers seldom target spades and catch triggers only when the primary target of the day was uncooperative.

I have been involved in fishery management issues since the early 1970s, and I still sit on three mid-Atlantic advisory committees and one state advisory committee. I sometimes think man trying to manage nature is like shoveling sand against the tide, but we have to try, or man would catch and sell the last living thing on the planet.

While catching more and different fish is a good thing, it won’t last. Soon the ocean will become unlivable as the overwhelming carbon dioxide causes the oxygen in the water to disappear.

Global warming will not kill me. I am almost 80 years old. If it is not reversed, it will kill my grandchildren, who are only 6 and 4 years old. Before it kills them, it will flood Rehoboth, Lewes, Ocean City, New York City and most of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia. Those areas have all been underwater before. Those hills we have around here and down to Cape Charles were at one time sand dunes. The next time you see a well-drilling outfit at work, stop and watch. See what the drill brings up. Sand and seashells.

Over the last few billion years, the earth has gone through lots of heating and cooling. It has survived. It will survive this warming as well. The question is, will we?

Fishing report

Fishing has really improved in the bay and ocean.

Tog action is really on fire. The Outer Wall off Lewes has given up four-fish limits to anglers who toggle off and fish with sand fleas and green crabs. Fish to 7 pounds have been caught here, but you must be careful when you toggle off the wall that you don’t end up on the wall. 

The ocean wrecks have seen tog to 20 pounds, but many anglers are releasing all the females they catch. The same baits work here, and at least one flounder has been caught off a wreck.

Flounder fishing has improved in the Broadkill River and the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal. White Gulp! has been mentioned in several reports as the bait of choice, but live minnows will also work.