Fishing Last Weekend...

Powhatan Creek, Williamsburg, Virginia

 

Last weekend my mom and I tried kayak fishing for the first time. I recently began using a bunch of my great grandfather's lures, and had some luck. We launched our kayaks from a boat ramp off of Jamestown Road, near the ferry and right across the street from Cooke's Garden Shop. It's a very nice little park there, with five docks to fish from and a small boat ramp, mostly just for kayaks. Watch out though, there are lots of snags right off the docks including lots of trees and submurged logs...

So we launched sometime around noon and began paddling up-stream. We first went around a first bend, passing a tree right in the middle and tossing a crankbait around its base with no luck. Right around the second bend the water got very shallow, only about six inches deep. No fish here, so might as well keep going forward. The surroundings soon became a cyprus swamp. After about a half an hour with no luck, I decided to toss in one of my grandfather's old lures. I began reeling it in relatively slowly with an occasionally jerk. About halfway back to my boat, I got a hit! The fish began pulling back and fo

Here is the Yellow Perch I caught
with the magical lure in its mouth.
I swear, the lure is like a fish magnet!

rth, left and right. I reeled in quick, trying to force the fish to the surface, but to no avail. The fish dived deeper and actually swam underneath my kayak, convincing me that I would capsize. But eventually I pulled the fish up and got it in my net. I had caught a northern pike! My first pike, and it was in a cyprus swamp of all places. Little did I know that later that I day I would end up catching another pike and my mom would get one too. We moved a little deeper into the swamp and I started tossing the same lure into the water. Soon enough I had landed two yellow perch. They are pretty good sized buggars that live in this swamp, but the fight is mediocre. I soon began to believe that my grandfather's lure was magic. I had really only thought that these perch would go after soft plastic jigs, but obviously the shiny bits do the job just as well. You can kind of see the lure in the picture to the left, but it's upside-down. The fishing moral I learned here is that one shouldn't get caught up in puchasing the next big lure that promises to catch every fish in the pond on every cast, but just go back to the basics, because they tend to work just as well, if not better. So after catching these perch, we moved even fu

Here is my mom's largemouth. Pretty
decent size. It had some sores on
its sides that I concluded to be the
scars left by parasites that I had seen
in this water.

rther into the swamp and started using my grandfather's lure and a wooden fire tiger lure I had picked up the day before, which my mom was using. She picked up a largemouth that extended from her elbow to the tips of her finger. She had cast toward shore and reeled in toward the kayak through some cyprus knees that were scattered in the water. The largemouth hit and jumped in the air trying to escape. Mom's kayak was turned and even pulled a little by the bass. Once whe got the fish in the net, I took out the lure and held up the bad boy. After that incident, I wanted my own bass! I tossed my greatgrandfater's lure in the water in the middle of the stream we were in and began realing in. I soon got a bight and knew that it had to be a bass. I fought with the fish for a minute or two as it dove under my boat into deaper water. I finally got it to the surface but there was a bundle of seaweed on the line just above the lure. Unfortunately, this seaweed unhooked the fish before I could get it in the net, but I could clearly see it was a decent size and that it was definetly a largemouth. All together the day was good, and we ended up catching three pike, two perches and two largemouths. So I most definetly recommend fishing powhatan creek's cyprus swamp during the dead low-tide, for you will get some fish. Happy fishing to all, and have a great summer. Keep those rods bending!