For the fishermen

If you aren't a fisherman, you probably won't enjoy this post.  However, there's enough folks who fish here that I thought I'd post a recent Potomac River trip report I submitted on a fishing site I frequent.  Hotcast and Captain Walleye are handles for a couple of the guys on that board.  Those who attended the July River Jam would recognize Hotcast as my friend Roger.  For those who are interested, CFS stands for Cubit Feet per Second.  It is used to measure the volume of water running past a gage at any given time.  Gage is intentionally mis-spelled.  It is the spelling used by the US Geologic Survey for their streamflow gages. 

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Based on several people's recommendations, I planned a trip to a particular island and ledge on the Potomac. There was heavy rain upstream. The closest Potomac upstream gage showed a quadrupelling of volume the day before - from roughly 2500 CFS to about 10000 CFS. A tributary between that gage and the location we were going to fish went from 1200 or so CFS to close to 8000. So there was an 18000 CFS slug of water coming... The only question was how fast was it coming? It had roughly 100 miles of river to travel to get to us. More local tributaries had no such increases despite heavy rains the day or two before.

Hotcast was with me. We made a plan to go to the river and check it out. If it was too swift for safety, we'd head either to one of the local tributaries or to some flat-water.

We got to the river. It was deep, but the main area we wanted to fish was above a decrepit dam we scoped out on the way to the parking lot. The water was spilling over it and through it, but the dam was still causing a significant pool. We got a report from a guy just coming off the river and spent some time looking at the water and comparing to my scout trips. Despite the ramp warning, we figured it was safe (or at least within our self-rescue skills) and so we pushed the canoe off the trailer and continued prepping. Just as we were about to move out into the flow, Captain Walleye pulled up in a kayak. He gave us an on-water report, which bolstered us in our opinion. After chatting a few minutes with Captain Walleye, we headed out into the flow. It was no problem for the 2.5hp Mercury to push the canoe upstream. There were no squirrelly currents. We made the ledge easily with no scares. The ledge was a different story. An island narrows the river and pushed water through two channels. The wider of the channels was far too swift to anchor and fish from a canoe. A bass boat would have been OK, but not a canoe. That ledge was where we wanted to fish. But the island creates an enormous eddy - on that day probably 250 yards long and 50 feet wide. Rather than give up, we fished the heck out of the head, the tail, the island bank, and the current seams from within the safety of that eddy. We spent about three hours casting everything we could and didn't have any fish landed to show for it.

When the air temperature dropped ten degrees in a few minutes and the clouds turned from battleship overcast to deep charcoal gray, we chose to get off the water. Just as we returned to the launch, lightning had changed from striking between clouds to striking downwards. We were peppered with wooden shrapnel from a nearby strike into a tree. The biggest part of the 18000 CFS slug had arrived, as the water bacame noticably muddier and swifter during our return. It was a good choice to leave the water, though from a precipitation standpoint we received just a few drops.

Well, we considered going back to my house to trade the gas engine for a trolling motor and heading to the flat-water. We called my wife, and she asked that we stay away for a while. It was my birthday, and I expected that she was prepping some surprises for me. So Hotcast and I went to a winery for a tasting and afterwards to a pub for a bite to eat. It's not the first time I've "fished" in a pub.

When we got back to my house, my suspicion was confirmed. My wife had prepared one of my favorite meals, a cake, and had some presents for me from her and the kids. As is our birthday tradition, we had dessert first and enjoyed some spice cake with dessert wine from the winery trip. Then we had a terrific pork chop dinner with some Sauvignon Blanc also from the winery. Hotcast joined us.

In all, it was a fantastic fishing day despite the lack of seeing anything with fins. There was a good friend, adventure, exploration, family, presents, a delicious meal, and delicious wine. We had all this good food and drink sitting comfortably at a table in a warm and dry house while the cold wind blew and the dreary rain fell outside. It could have been a lot worse, and so rather than curse being skunked we toasted our good fortune.