Going down fishing memory lane

Last week, I looked back on the memories I had after a long time hunting everything from rabbits and squirrels to deer and geese. I thought this week I would look back on an even longer time spent fishing for everything from mill roach to marlin. 

I caught my very first fish as a small child out of Drawyer Creek in Odessa with a bent pin and a piece of black sewing thread on a stick, put together by Mrs. Eppler, a South Carolina lady and close friend of my grandparents. I was feeding the local fish little balls of bread from our picnic when Mrs. Eppler brought me her custom-made fishing outfit. Sure enough, I put one of the bread balls on the hook, and the rest is history.

While I could hunt behind my house, I could not fish in the Delaware River in the 1940s and ’50s. The river was polluted with every chemical known to man, and raw sewage ran straight from our toilets into the river. Today, I am happy to say fish can once again swim upstream past Claymont, Marcus Hook and Chester.

My fishing was restricted to Naamans Creek until I could ride my bike out to Brandywine Creek. I did fish from the beach in Rehoboth when we went on vacation, and when my grandfather took me with his friends from work on a croaker trip out of Bivalve, Md. Pop bought a 7.5-horsepower Elgin motor, and we fished out of Slaughter Beach a few times before I went into the Navy in January 1961.

The summer of 1965, I began camping in a tent on the south side of Indian River Inlet, and fishing the surf and the jetty every weekend. Fishing was pretty good. We caught blues, rockfish, and every once in awhile, a trout. Little did we know then that trout would dominate the fishery in just a few years.

The highlight of the weakfish bonanza was the World Weakfish Tournament held out of Slaughter Beach over a three-day period. Sponsored by the Milford Chamber of Commerce, with Jack Nyland the moving force behind the promotion, the tournament attracted hundreds of anglers from all over the area.

Live by the weakfish, die by the weakfish. That’s exactly what happened to Slaughter Beach. When the weakfish left, so did the fishermen, and so did the business they brought.

There were two fish we caught a lot of back then that we don’t see in Delaware anymore. First is Boston mackerel. We used to catch them by the hundreds on mackerel rigs fished anywhere from just offshore out to B and A buoys.

The second is winter flounder. These fish would show up every spring, and we could catch them in great numbers out of Indian River and Rehoboth bays. Bloodworms were the prime baits, and we would chum with cat food from an anchored boat. It was not unusual for two anglers to catch 50 flounder on a tide.

In 1973, my late brother-in-law Paul Coffin bought a 22-Mako, and we began to explore the ocean. The first year, we went after big blues at B Buoy on Hoochie Trolls and some football bluefins on cedar plugs at the Lightship.

The next year, it was off to the canyons and my first white marlin. The following year, we caught the first white marlin of the season out of Delaware. That was an exciting day as Paul, Lark Bonelli and I boated the white at the 30-fathom line before the other boats reached the canyons, passing by excellent sign at the 30.

Not all my memories are from Delaware. We moved to Virginia Beach in 1989, and I began to fish the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel for striped bass, tog, gray trout, speckled trout, flounder, red drum, black drum, bluefish, Spanish mackerel, and more recently, sheepshead. In the ocean, we caught amberjack, tuna, dolphin, sea bass, king mackerel and flounder. 

I have also been lucky to do some traveling. The biggest trip was to Tropic Star Lodge in Panama. There, I caught a 500-pound black marlin and a big Pacific sailfish. Trips to the Keys have produced bonefish, tarpon and blackfin tuna. Santee Cooper was a great place for catching lots of striped bass and big catfish. Running out of Cape Hatteras had me hooked up to giant bluefin tuna. Fishing the beach along the Point, and at Rodanthe and Avon produced giant blues, flounder, sea mullet and gray trout.

When Barry Truitt invited me to fish the Virginia Barrier Islands, I thought I had found paradise. Beaches that stretched for miles with just two people fishing, and we were catching black and red drum on peeler crab. What great memories!