Maryland Bay Grasses Decline in 2006

Secrets Of The Chesapeake Bay Revealed: The Sassafras River

The Upper Chesapeake Bay has been receiving  a lot of notoriety over the last few years due to the improved catch rates and overall weight increases reported in the tournaments. While the “true” river rats have known of this bass fishing hotbed for some time now, the recent success is attracting clubs from all over Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and even as far away as New York. Most of this pressure has converged on the Elk River, and the Tyding’s Park area in Havre de Grace, Md., since these areas provide more than adequate launching and parking facilities that are necessary to hold the tournaments. Many of the smaller club tournaments also start from the Northeast and Elk River areas.

With this influx of angling pressure, many of the traditional “hot spots” have become increasingly crowded during the weekends, and have forced anglers to make longer and longer runs in search of untapped bass waters. Many of these anglers have now discovered that the twenty to thirty minute drive through sometimes rough and unsafe water, to the Sassafras River, has been well worth the effort. Upon arriving they realize that not only is this river not as pressured, but the fishing rivals or surpasses any that they previously encountered on any of the other Upper Bay rivers. Over the past five years, we have spent an average of four days a week on the Sassafras River, and over this course of time have learned many of the subtle intricacies of this scenic and fertile river.

Successfully Targeting Summer Croaker on the Chesapeake Bay

Rigging Jerk Baits aka Plastics

My fishing roots go back to freshwater bass fishing with my brother Spencer where we would fish the ponds on our farm and those of our neighbors. The artificial baits that we found produced the best results were always plastics, specifically jerk baits like Slug-gos, plastic lizards, purple Berkley Power Bait were ous plastic of choice, and also purple worms with a curly tail.

Through all the years I have rigged plastics every which way, but a few common techniques have worked consistently. When fishing shallow and pitching weed lines we liked to rig our plastic weightless and weed-less. The picture to the right is a good depiction of how we would do it. One thing to note when you rig the plastics like this is that you want to make sure there is enough slack in the front part of the bait that when you set the hook the hook will come through the plastic. But you need to make sure that while you have enough slack that the bait is also straight or it will not swim correctly.

 
The second way (picture below) we have had success is using a freshwater hook with the weight on the bottom of the shank. The advantage of using this type of hook is that it has a plastic/worm holding pin like shank to hold the worm. This eliminates the need to thread the plastic up through the hook shank. But, you still have to make sure there is enough slack to allow the hook to protrude through the plastic when setting the hook.  This set up also keeps your bait to stay relatively parallel to the bottom when reeling as opposed to a jig head that we will discuss next that gives more of a jigging/diving action. When we ever used this type of hook we usually fished a worm with a twist tail n the end and used it to cover a lot of ground looking for fish. It also allows an angler that is not that experienced in fish a plastic or jerk bait to be able to just slow reel the bait.