A Place Where You’re the Big Fish

By Ray Cox | ray.cox@roanoke.com | 381-1672

Sometimes shock and awe take place on a sunny day in a muddy river without a missile being fired or bomb dropped.

Such was the case on a fishing trip to a nearby Montgomery County stretch of the Little River one day in July. The ostensible prey for Mike Grant and me was smallmouth bass. Expectations were modest. Nothing big basswise, you understand. Maybe we might get lucky and hook a bluegill or redbreast for some variety of catfish. Nothing too substantial there either.

But you never know. In Virginia’s small rivers and creeks, nice to fish because they’re away from the crowds on the famous blue- ribbon waters such as the New and James rivers, you never know what you might catch.

Still, on that particular day on the Little River, whatever that might be duped by Mike’s pale greenish brown tube rig or my popper didn’t figure to have much heft to it. Small water, small fish, as the conventional wisdom has it.

The water was murky, the result of hard thunderstorms upriver in Floyd County during the drought-stricken summer.

“This river is so silty, it doesn’t take anything to get it muddy,” Mike had said. “Let’s try it anyway.”

My popper wasn’t doing anything as we worked a riffle down from the bridge from which we had lurched and skidded down the bank to the river. It was warm but not bad for July, a nice breeze and plenty of cigar puff clouds to keep the afternoon heat down. The water was cooler than we would have thought.

A couple of feeble swats at the popper from a couple of little fellows, probably reckless juvenile bream, was all that was happening for me. So I dumped the popper — pearl with a ruby mouth, black rubber legs, and black and white feather tail — in favor of a tan and brown subsurface streamer.

By this time, Mike had already nailed a couple of nice ones, working a thin pool hard up against an island to the left of the channel.

“This is a good one,” he said after the second one hit and moved into the fast water.

That was enough to convince me that a change of tactics was in order. A tuft of grass was hanging over what looked like a deep pocket beside a jumble of rocks. A roll cast was a little off target, farther from the grass than intended, but not bad just the same. A second later, something jerked, hard. Then nothing. I hadn’t been counting on any hits like that.

“There’s something pretty big here,” I said.

Usually speaking, only the most reckless game fish hit an artificial more than once. But on the off chance the 1 in 100 that would swipe again were in that hole, I threw over there one more time. As soon as the streamer hit the water something grabbed it. Then the line went slack. Probably snagged a rock, I thought. The rod bent again.

“Got one?” asked Mike, who had been working the faster water along the opposite bank.

The line started going slack again.

“Lost him.”

“No you haven’t,” he said. “It’s coming toward you.”

I reeled fast to take up the excess line. In an instant, it seemed as though whatever finny fiend I had on was almost at my feet. I raised the rod to vertical, holding it aloft as high as arms fitted for a 35-inch sleeve would stretch.

Then I saw the fish.

“This is a daggone trout!”

Of all the aquatic critters you’d expect to catch in the Little River in the middle of the summer, a trout would not figure to be among them. Trout won’t make it in water warmer than about 69 or 70 degrees. Only spring-fed streams, tailwaters from big dams and mountain streams will hold trout year-round. A cold-water fish, they’ll just keel over in a warm stream like the summery Little River, ghastly gray blotches forming on their sides as they suffocate.

But sometimes in streams that go warm in the summer, trout find a spring in a deep hole and hang out in the cool recesses until the weather changes. That’s what must have happened with the trout I caught in the Little River.

No telling how long he had been there. The bad boy was a horse, too. It had taken a while and some finesse to haul it in. An ancient rainbow with a once-bright horizontal red stripe faded to a pinkish silver, he was citation-size for sure, 5, maybe 6, pounds, although there were no scales present. Who needs scales when you’re fishing for sunfish and undersized bronzebacks?

Flabbergasted as I was, Mike produced a battered disposable camera and tried to snap a couple of pictures as I crouched holding the beast in the weeds and rocks at water’s edge. Then we turned him loose. Still strong, it took the trout only a couple of seconds to get his fins back under him after the hook had been freed. He shot out of my cradling hands like a torpedo from a tube and beat it on down the line upstream.

That wasn’t the last fish we caught that day. You might have said Mike slew them if he had kept any. One hole, he caught at least four smallmouth that any fisherman would have been delighted with on the New River.

“I’m not believing this,” he said a couple of times.

This wasn’t near his first turn on this stretch of river. Now the golf coach at Radford University, he grew up a Radford High Bobcat before taking his clubs to Virginia Commonwealth and the Rams team. The day we went fishing recently, I was a stranger in those scenic parts.

Maybe it was the murky water, we figured. Maybe we just got lucky. Both of us had a day. He caught more and bigger (with the notable exception of the rainbow) than I did. The haul for both of us included more redeyes than smallmouths, but not by a lot. I caught some bluegills on another popper.

The bite never stopped. We quit before the fish did.

The best part was once again, we were reminded: When you’re fishing some of the off-the-beaten river bass streams of the New River Valley, you never can tell what you’re liable to hook and you can always avoid the crowd.

The mob was what one Kentucky fisherman was trying to escape when I ran into him on a heavily fished Pulaski County stretch of the New River recently.

“These fish have been beat half to death by all these people,” the Kentuckian said mournfully.

Make no mistake, you may get beat half to death trying to hike your way down to some sections of good bass streams such as Big Walker Creek in Giles and Bland counties. The rocks are loose, the briars sticky and the poison ivy bountiful. Both branches of the Roanoke River in Montgomery County have some of the slickest rocks and most treacherous footing in any of the submerged parts of the Old Dominion.

Yet it can be worth it on these streams and many more a bit farther away. The fish can be many and ruthless.

Another day, Mike, his 11-year-old, Jake, and I fished Big Walker for a few hours. They wore jeans and wading shoes. I wore quick-dry shorts and felt-bottom with metal cleats wading boots.

They caught fish after fish, Jake at one point pulling a whopper smallie out of a moderate fast run before it lurched free as he was bringing it to chest level.

“That one doesn’t count,” said his father using old-school scoring rules.

One devil big bass walked me downstream from pool to pool over the length of a couple of football fields before it ducked under a rock and snapped the wisp of a tippet. Cussing followed, but out of Jake’s earshot.

That was it for the bad language. At Big Walker Creek and a lot of streams like it all over the state, a summer afternoon of fishing offers scant chance to complain.

Big stream: Plentiful boat launch and public access points.

Small stream: Ask permission. Beware of dog.

Big stream: Jet boat, john boat with trolling motor.

Small stream: Canoe, float tube, wade

Big stream: Plenty of room to cast.

Small stream: Lure hung in streamside sycamore.

Big stream: Crowds admire impressive catch.

Small stream: “Really? Where’s the picture?”

Big stream: Citation smallmouth.

Small stream: Stray carp.

Big stream: Tipsy tubers floating by.

Small stream: A mother mallard and her ducklings paddle on parade.

Big stream: Tire half submerged in mud.

Small stream: Tire half submerged in mud.n Mike Grant was using a spinning reel, ultra-light rod, and 4-pound test line. He used tube lures and spinners. His son Jake used a similar rig. I was armed with my favorite bass fly rod, an old 8-foot, 6-inch L.L. Bean 6- weight my buddy Spider bought for a couple of bucks at a yard sale a long time ago. The fly reel is a cheapie Cabela’s probably a decade old. To the floating fly line was tied a thick leader meant for horsing bass out of weeds in a farm pond. To the leader was tied a 2-foot length of 5X tippet.

n To find out-of-the way water, grab a map and hit the road searching. On some streams there are pull-offs and no posted signs. Just about all these streams flow through private land. Whenever in doubt, never set foot on private land without knocking on doors until you find the owner. Ask permission. Thank him if he says no and move on. If he says yes, do him favors. Give him food and gifts. Tell him you will catch and release only. Know how to catch and release correctly. Don’t bring anybody with you unless the owner agrees to it first. Tell nobody.

(c) 2007 Roanoke Times & World News. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.