Try Metal Jigs for Fall Stripers & Blues
from The Fishing Wire

Diamond jigs are the hot ticket for fast Mid-Atlantic action from now through year-end

Fishing along the Mid-Atlantic coast isn’t over so keep the boat in the water, break out the cold weather gear and enjoy some of the best inshore fishing of the year.

One of the most productive techniques available from fall into early winter is vertical jigging using the simplest of lures, the venerable diamond jig. It’s just a long, shiny, four-sided piece of metal with a swinging tail hook, but this gem of a lure has been catching gamefish for a hundred years, and it is still one of the most productive you can fish with in saltwater. Talk about staying power; the diamond jig has it.

You can make a diamond jig dance in a number of different ways to imitate a variety of baitfish and in the process attract the attention of pretty much any gamefish you come across. This time of year the primary baitfish on the inshore grounds is a slender silver and olive-colored fish called a sand eel. They are found in enormous schools from a few miles offshore to right in the wash, and are feasted upon by striped bass, weakfish, bluefish and bottom species like sea bass and codfish. Even whales can be found swimming through the schools devouring them by the ton.

Sand eels get their name because of their eel-like shape and because they will frequently dive into sandy sections of ocean bottom in a bid to escape the jaws of hungry predators trying to eat them. Diamond and a variety of similar metal jigs are among the best imitation of the look and swimming motion of sand eels. They come in a variety of weights, but for stripers and bluefish, which will rarely be found in water deeper than 70 feet at this time of year, the two- and four-ounce models are ideal. Most jigs are chrome with a plain or tube tail hook, but painted diamond jigs are also becoming popular. They can be fished using spinning or light conventional outfits. The most popular are saltwater size baitcasting reels on medium action trigger stick rods loaded with braided line for extra sensitivity. Top that off with a 3- or 4-foot length of fluorocarbon leader material and a clip to make it easy to change lures quickly, and you’re ready to go.

Vertical jigging is a simple and effective technique, but it relies on more than just rods, reels and lures. Unlike trolling, you have to find schools of bait and gamefish and position the boat on top of them before you start fishing. That means you have to be adept at using your fishfinder to identify the right targets and position the boat above or close by. When schools of bait are thick and the gamefish are mixing it up, that’s pretty easy to accomplish. But when the bait is scattered and the gamefish are in smaller pods, it takes a bit more concentration and search time. Vertical jigging over empty ocean bottom is not very productive, so there’s no sense wasting time and energy when you don’t have fish showing on the sonar screen. It’s best to hunt until you find them.

Identifying where fish are holding in the water column is also important. If the bait and gamefish are holding right on the bottom, then you want to keep you jigs near the bottom. If they are holding mid water, you’ll want to work them up higher in the water column so your lures spend the maximum time in the strike zone.

Bringing a jig to life is pretty easy. Drop it with the reel in free spool, but watch the line as it sinks. If you see the line slow or jump, get in gear, tighten up and set the hook. If it reaches the desired depth or strikes bottom, then start a moderate retrieve that incorporates a lift and drop motion. If the fish are holding near the bottom, don’t reel at all. With the reel in gear, lift the jig until the rod tip is high, then drop it so the jig flutters back down. When the jig is dropping, try to follow its descent with the rod tip so the line doesn’t have too much slack. Gamefish frequently grab the lure while it’s sinking, and you want to be able to feel any subtle strikes. When you do, set the hook.

Remember that sand eels sometimes dive into the bottom to get away from predators. When they emerge they leave a little puff of sand behind. You can imitate this behavior by allowing the jig to strike the bottom before each lift. If you’re not getting bites while actively working the jig, try dropping it all the way to the bottom and reeling it back up at a slow to moderate pace. There are days when stripers will follow a jig almost to the surface and grab it just before you’re ready to lift it out of the water for the next drop or cast.

Speaking of casting, you can reach out with jigs by casting them well away from the boat and letting them sink to the bottom. Then start a lift-and-drop motion with a turn or two of the reel handle after each lift. This will walk the jig back to the boat with an up-and-down action that can be extremely effective and covers more area than just dropping the jig straight down.

Fishing jigs is a favorite technique for catching striped bass and bluefish, and the bonus is you can do it on very light tackle, which makes battling these able fighters all the more fun. Give it a try; it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it, and you will have a technique to add to your arsenal that you can rely on year after year – because diamond jigs are forever.

Look Who’s Back: Sturgeon are Spawning Again in the Chesapeake Bay
from The Fishing Wire

Matt Balazik with Sturgeon

Atlantic sturgeon are spawning again in the Chesapeake Bay. But they’ve been gone so long that we’ve forgotten the basic life history information that scientists need to boost their recovery. A species recovery grant from NOAA Fisheries should help.

In 1997, Dave Secor was a young fisheries biologist just starting his career at the University of Maryland. Like almost everyone else, he believed that Atlantic sturgeon, a species that has survived since the age of the dinosaurs, had been long gone from the Chesapeake Bay. But that year a small number of juvenile sturgeon turned up, and they were too small to have immigrated from elsewhere.

“That was a major surprise,” Secor said.

Though sightings were rare back then and still are today, the population of sturgeon that spawn in the Chesapeake Bay has grown. In 2012 that population was added to the endangered species list. Usually a listing is bad news, but in this case it was cause for celebration.

Now scientists are racing to find out what’s driving the recovery so they can reinforce it. Their efforts recently got a big boost when NOAA Fisheries awarded a three-year, $1.75 million species recovery grant to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

Atlantic sturgeon were prized for their flesh and for the caviar made from their roe. But fishing for them in the Chesapeake peaked in the 1890’s, and no one alive today has seen a healthy run of sturgeon in the Bay. Even basic information about their life history was forgotten long ago, and this is a problem for the scientists working to protect them.

“We need to find out where they’re spawning so we can protect that habitat,” Secor said. Scientists also hope to locate their nursery grounds and to identify the biggest threats to their recovery. Ship strikes and poor water quality are among the top suspects.

“This recovery may be part of a cycle,” said Secor. “If we don’t pursue this now, we may not see it again for another 20 or 30 years.”

A Fish That’s Hard to Follow

But finding their spawning grounds is difficult, not least because there are so few of them out there. To solve that problem, scientists will use the new funding to tag about 240 sturgeon with acoustic transmitters. That will allow scientists to track their movements in the Bay.

Atlantic sturgeon spend most of their time at sea, travelling up and down the shelf break where they plow the bottom with their snouts, eating worms and crustaceans. Like salmon, they return to their natal streams to spawn.

Unlike most salmon, however, which spawn once and die, sturgeon make the spawning run repeatedly. They can live up to 60 years and can grow up to 14 feet (4.3 meters) and 800 pounds (370 kg).

Matt Balazik, a postdoc at Virginia Commonwealth University, is doing most of the tagging. The acoustic tag, about the size of a Sharpie marker, is inserted into the belly of the fish through a small incision. The minor surgery takes less than five minutes, and the unharmed fish are quickly sent on their way.

The tag emits a coded sound roughly once a minute, a signal that’s recorded whenever the fish passes within range of a receiver. Each tag has a unique acoustic signature, allowing scientists to track individual fish.

“You can think of the tag as like an EZPass,” said Matt Balazik, referring to the device that motorists in the Northeast attach to their windshields, “and of the receivers as toll booths.”

An acoustic signal is used because sound waves travel well underwater. Radio waves would dissipate quickly in the murky Bay.

Collaboration is Key

Scientists have tagged sturgeon all along the Eastern seaboard, but the Chesapeake is uniquely difficult because it’s a meta-estuary-an estuary comprised of many smaller estuaries-and it’s the largest one in the nation.

“In the Hudson it’s a piece of cake,” said Dave Secor. “A few receivers bank to bank and you’ve got the river covered at that point.” The mouth of the Chesapeake, on the other hand, is 20 miles wide.

But the tagging project got a big boost from the Navy, which recently installed an array of 58 receivers, most attached to Coast Guard buoys, throughout the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

The Naval Base at Norfolk, Virginia is the largest in the nation, and it’s one of several naval installations in the lower Chesapeake Bay. As a federal agency, the Navy is required to minimize interactions with endangered species.

“We want to know where and when sturgeon are utilizing the Bay,” said Carter Watterson, a Navy biologist. “Once we know that, we can work to minimize any impact we have on the species.”

The Navy will benefit from the tags that Maryland and Virginia researchers deploy because they increase the value of the receiver array. And the state researchers will benefit every time Watterson sends them tracking data on their fish.

The buoys the receivers are attached to also record environmental data, allowing scientists to correlate sturgeon activity with ocean conditions. This will be key to understanding how those conditions affect the fish, and in particular how sensitive the fish are to the low oxygen levels that plague the Bay every summer.

A Living Fossil

Sturgeon have existed in pretty much the same form for at least 85 million years. A living fossil, they survived the meteors that killed off the dinosaurs and many other catastrophes since. “They’re designed to handle anything,” Matt Balazik said. “Except humans.”

But don’t write them off just yet. “The fact that they’re still hanging in there makes me a bit more optimistic than I was earlier in my career,” said Dave Secor, the biologist who was surprised to see juvenile sturgeon in the Chesapeake Bay in 1997.

“What sturgeon have taught me as a scientist,” he said, “is that sometimes it can be delightful when you’re wrong.”