Kayaking has appeal

Despite Ups and Downs, Kayak Fishing Has Appeal

GRASONVILLE, Md.

Some things are made for each other -- black rum and ginger beer, tuna and tomatoes, shorts and flip-flops -- and some things are not. Into the latter category I've always put kayaks and fishing.

It just seems like the wrong gear for the job. You're cramped, too low to the water to see the holes and humps on the bottom and angling is impossible while piloting the boat. You can't cast and reel or twitch a fly if you have both hands on a double-bladed paddle.
But kayak fishing keeps growing in popularity. People seem to like the simplicity, the good aerobic workout, the silence, the carbon footprint you don't leave behind and the fact that a sea kayak takes you places bigger boats can't go.

You mustn't shut your mind to new things without trying them, so when a half-day trip with Eastern Shore fishing guide C.D. Dollar popped up at last year's Maryland Coastal Conservation Association banquet auction, up went my right hand once too often.

Dollar, like most guides, generally focuses on bigger, more exotic species. Lately he's been traveling south on the Eastern Shore to Crisfield and Hoopers Island to chase speckled trout in the shallow marsh creeks. I threw him a bit of a curve by asking to stick close to home and target white perch, among the best-eating fish in the Chesapeake, which are small, abundant and decidedly not exotic.
Dollar accepted and we met last week before the sun was up. In late June, a few days after the longest day of the year, that's early.

He keeps about 20 kayaks so he can run eco-tours for large groups. This day he had a dozen or so stacked on an aluminum trailer. Four of us piled into his truck and headed for the Queen Anne's County public landing on Cabin Creek, a few miles from Kent Narrows and noisy Route 50.

One advantage of kayaks is you don't need a launch ramp. There was none there so we simply hauled the little boats through some reeds and pushed off the banks, bound for big water. Dollar's boats are 12 to 15 feet long, with back rests for comfort and raised seats to keep your bum out of the bay water that sloshes around. They're wide, heavy and stable; you'd have a hard time flipping one if you stayed seated.

A few places on Cabin Creek offer vistas across unspoiled marsh meadows to the garish gray condos at Kent Narrows that somehow eluded environmental strictures. Who in this enlightened age gets a permit to build 100 waterfront houses on a marsh? But for the most part, all we saw was woods and wildlife -- great blue herons, ospreys and terns fishing, bait rippling the water and maybe a muskrat swimming.

Our destination was a set of man-made oyster-shell reefs a mile away, but after a half-mile or so Dollar pointed to the shoreline and urged us to cast along the banks, where drowned tree stumps studded the bottom. I immediately hooked something that was not a perch, which brought home how challenging kayak fishing can be.

It was a rockfish, I suspect, probably 18 inches long, that went tearing off through the stump field with my best perch lure in its mouth. Naturally, it took the worst possible direction. I was fighting the fish over my shoulder while frantically trying to hand-paddle the boat around to face the fish. With four-pound test line you don't get second chances. Very quickly the fish snapped off and I said a bad word.
Larry Coburn, my longtime fishing buddy, meantime had decided to step out of his kayak to fish from the bank. The water was a little deeper than he expected and he wound up neck-deep with a lot of splashing. We all had a laugh. Jeff Nicklason, in the third boat, was strictly fly-fishing and getting nothing.
We eventually managed to pluck a few perch from the stumps. Then it was off on a spirited, 20-minute upwind paddle across the waterway to the oyster reefs, roughly marked with buoys. Once more, I almost immediately stuck another nice rockfish that broke off with yet another perch lure after 45 seconds of mayhem. Next time I'm bringing eight-pound test line and those fish won't stand much chance.
On a bright, clear day our little armada began probing the rough, underwater bumps and hills. Small, quarter-ounce spinner baits and curly-tailed grubs drew the most strikes and Nicklason and Coburn eventually gave up on the flyrods. Before long all four of us were boating plump, eight- to 10-inch white perch, just big enough to filet. The last of the flood tide sped up the bite, but when the tide went slack the fishing went dead and it was time to head back with a stringer full of fresh perch.
Back at home, I probed the Internet and found amazing tales of kayak fishing on the West Coast, where motherships take small fleets of kayak anglers out into the ocean and turn them loose on schools of dorado, tuna and other 60- and 70-pound fish. The anglers described getting towed along for 1,000 yards by racing fish, which doesn't sound bad. A Pacific sleigh ride, I think they call it.


Bottom line? Well, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire probably took awhile getting used to each other. Gin and tonic didn't happen overnight. Kayak fishing has its ups and downs but at the end of the day, you've worked some muscles you'd forgotten you had, bagged a little catch of fish to fry and left nothing behind but a few ripples from your wake. You could do worse.