The skim ice tinkled like broken wine goblets as I pushed it ahead. Fortunately it was not thick enough to cut my waders. In the back corner of the cove, a great blue heron flapped ungainly across the marsh to collapse in a far tree. In the distance, a mallard squawked its Aflac insurance commercial.
We were fishing one of the many salt marsh coves that lace the Severn River in the Arnold area. Jim Heim was flinging a small pike fly on a fly rod, and our host, John Page Williams, was working a short rattle worm.
Turning the corner of the cove, the ice lay like shards of window panes, proving the left side of my proposed honey-hole cove unfishable. Sheet ice was everywhere. A cast lure can punch through skim ice but also prevents a retrieve.
Minutes after returning to open water, I landed a nice yellow perch. It solidly hit a lightly weighted tube lure stuffed with a Woodies rattle. Williams, using a rattle worm, then landed a pickerel that was cruising the grass edge.
“It?s Christmas week, and here we are looking at birds, fishing this pretty marsh cove and catching perch and pickerel,” said Williams, carefully prying the rattle-fitted hook in the Texas-rigged worm from the pickerel?s mouth. “What could be better?” He released the pickerel back to the 40-degree water.
Williams, who lives in the area and works as a senior naturalist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, tries to slip out from his home as much as possible for one- to three-hour trips. He starts in mid-October and continues through the winter as long as the ice is out or there is enough open water to allow casts.
Typically, catches are “15 to 20 fish to the rod in a three-hour trip,” he said. Three hours is a good trip. It is cold, and dressing warmly in layers with fleece collars, fingerless gloves, watch caps and sweat pants or fleece pajamas as wader insulation is a must.
Metabolism of fish is also reduced so that slow fishing with addition of scent or noise helps provoke hits. For us, lures with the Woodies rattles seemed to work best. More pickerel and yellow perch were landed, and one big white perch came unbuttoned at the boat. Had we landed it, we would have had a Severn River “slam.”
We alternately fished from Williams? 17-foot Boston Whaler or used it as a water taxi to step out and wade the marshes, casting to shallows in and alongside of weed and grass beds.
Williams starts his fishing in weed beds up through late October, then switches to fishing the ambush points alongside grass, where the fish move as the water temperature drops. His favorite lure for fall fishing the grass is a quarter-ounce Johnson Silver Minnow with a “sticky sharp” point. He then switches to a gold spoon with a free-swinging hook to take white and yellow perch, pickerel and also rockfish, finally switching to rattle-rigged soft plastics.
With the colder weather that we have now, it is best to slow w-a-y down on retrieve, twitch to make rattle lures work and go with soft plastics such as Gulp! or Yum lures. Small worms are good along with grubs and tube lures, since the fish often strike short.
“The critters [fish] don?t go away in the winter, and neither should we,” Williams said emphatically in making a case for his winter fishing trips.
The fishing continues until yellow perch ascend to the river head to spawn. And there is little or no competition for this winter fishing action. We saw one other boat during our afternoon trip. But we saw a lot of wildlife.
With his Chesapeake Bay Foundation background, Williams can?t help but to provide a running “nature tour” commentary on oyster bars, oyster reclamation, exotic species invading the marshes, birds, native marsh plants, Bay restoration, the importance of Bay grasses, historic yellow perch spawning runs, clean water, wildlife and fish.
On the way back to the ramp, a huge flock of tundra (whistling) swans, freshly in from the Arctic or perhaps the Hudson Bay, got up and flew to give us a Christmas-card view. And we had just left our last waded salt marsh, where we found otter tracks in the sand. It just doesn?t get any better than that.
C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally known sportsman and award-winning writer on fishing, hunting, and the outdoors, and he has more than 20 books to his credit. He can be reached at [email protected].
