Sheepshead and croakers and drum, oh my!

As many of you know, I lived in Virginia Beach from 1989 until 2000, when I returned to my native Delaware. While there, I ran a guide service and had some success taking small parties on my 24-foot Albemarle to fishing locations in the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. In those days, the main targets were striped bass, cobia, flounder, croaker, amberjack, Spanish mackerel, king mackerel, black sea bass, spadefish and the occasional dolphin. With a selection like that, I seldom had a skunk in the box.

Last week I returned to Virginia Beach to fish with my son Ric, who stayed there after his brother Roger moved to New Jersey and I, as mentioned, left for Delaware. Thank goodness one of us remained.

Ric is a high school teacher as well as the editor of Kayak Angler Magazine and a contributor to several national outdoor publications. He does a lot of fishing from his kayak, but when I visit, he has to dust off his 20-foot Jones Brothers center console with the 150 Yamaha motor. That is what we launched around 7 a.m., Tuesday morning at Rudee Inlet.

I told Ric I had never caught a large sheepshead and would like to try for one while I was there. In preparation for this, Ric purchased a supply of fiddler crabs that spent the night in his kitchen enjoying the air conditioning. Ric’s wife is visiting her mother out of town, or else the crabs, Ric and I would have spent the night in the garage.

We headed for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Ric picked a piling out of the many available to try for a sheepshead. He tossed a large float between the pilings and snagged the attached line with his boat hook. Tying the line to the bow cleat allowed the boat to hold close to the piling, too close for my comfort. Ric, sitting on the bow, was able to drop his crab between the two lines, tight to the encrusted structure. Since I could not get up on the bow, I had to try to drop my crab on a jig as close as I could to the piling. It wasn’t close enough.

We did this procedure on a few pilings before I saw Ric’s rod double over and he quickly passed it to me. My first big sheepshead was a bit of a disappointment. After I cranked it up to the surface, it made another half-hearted dive, then just flopped around until Ric put it in the net. We weighed the fish before putting it on ice. It tipped the scales at 9 pounds. We hit a few more pilings before putting an 8-pounder on ice.

I had watched a head boat fishing up the bay and asked Ric if we could move that way. We did, and as soon as my Fishbites bloodworm-baited top-bottom rig hit the bottom 50 feet below, I was hooked up. It was one croaker after the other, and we were nowhere near the head boat.

Those who know me know how much I love bottomfishing, but Ric, not so much. Since the croaker were on the small size and we had plenty of meat in the box, we moved behind the Fourth Island and had lunch.

Ric thought one of the men on another boat close to us was hooked to a red drum. He has side-scan sonar on his boat and sure enough, it picked up a school of big fish off to the side. Ric made one cast with a green lure that looks like nothing in nature, and instantly the rod bent double. He handed me the rod and I was in for a great battle.

The drum’s first run almost emptied the spool. Ric began to chase the fish while I cranked like heck to gain back the line. She made several more good runs and then we saw her on the surface. What a fish! I was really excited then. The runs were getting shorter and Ric broke out the big net. She tried to run under the boat at one point, but we were able to stop that move. Finally, Ric got her in the net and on the deck. After a few quick photos and a measurement with a strand of leader material because Ric didn’t have a tape measure, the fish was released.

When we measured the strand of leader material, it was 47 inches fork length. My biggest red drum ever. Ric was kind enough to take me to Ocean’s East Tackle Shop where we filled out the paperwork for a Virginia Release Citation. My first in a long time. We had planned to fish the ocean on Thursday, but the weather got us, so I came back home.