Chesapeake on the Upper Potomac

Catin' around on the Potomac was a lot of fun but the 5:30 start with my buddy Bill on Saturday was what I was really looking forward to. I knew my excitement was high when I woke up in my car at the boat ramp nearly an hour before Bill arrival. Instead of fighting it I pulled my Whisperlite Shaker Stove out and cooked me some Peaches and Cream Quaker Oatmeal in preparation to fighting those huge smallmouth bass I knew we were going to catch.

Bill arrived right on time and we hit the river in his awesome Xpress Jet boat. Though sleep had escaped me, I was stoked to be motoring up the Potomac to our favorite section. Surprisingly the river was quite stained with only about a 8" of visibility even though the level was quite low. I also noticed the water was a little choppy for being on a flowing river.

As Bill dropped the trolling motor and we started throwing our 3 1/2" tubes we discussed the condition of the river and concluded the Shenandoah River upstream must have caught some heavy rain in Virginia. I picked up the first average sized bronze back that was more white than bronze on my black with red fleck tube. After and hour we realized this was not going to be the easiest day to catch those fish we could write home about. The current carried us down river, we casting like mad men, and threw our normal verbal jabs back and forth. We noticed the wind was picking up and the weather radio was only predicting 10 mph winds or less.  As we looked down river we saw a lot of white caps.  It really did look like we were fishing on the wide open Chesapeake Bay.  Needless to say we were giving the weather channel some of those verbal jabs with their inaccurate predictions. Catching more stick and rocks than fish we were still having a blast with our continual banter with some meaningful conversation.

We caught a couple smallies when I hooked into what I thought was a hog. Bringing the big guy to the boat built the adrenaline and hope for a better day. To my surprise as he broke the water at the boat it was a decent sized whisker face bass, more commonly known as a cat fish. I asked him when I pulled him out of the water where he might have been when I was fishing for him nearly seven hour before. By this time we had thrown about everything in the tackle box at what we hoped would be the nose of a nice bass. Bill was fishing with what I now call the cat clacker because even though I've seen him drag some nice smallies to the boat with it he managed to drag three whisker face bass over the bow with that crazy lure. Yet another experience with cat fish I had not had in my 30 years of fishing.