Salt Water Recon

When you fish blue lines it's usually definable, the upper Rapidan, Devils Ditch, etc.  so I was abit overwhelmed when Fritz, Jacob and I arrived to fish, "the lower Chesapeake" there's so much water in that descriptor that it would take a lifetime to fish it all so what we bit off was a survey of several definable fisheries.   Fritz with some time on his hands!!! dove into fishing blogs and found Lynnhaven Inlet located just south and east of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (CBBT) in Virginia Beach.

Lynnhaven Inlet Broadly brodered by 225, 264 & 279

After a long slog from NOVA we slid our two canoes into Lynhaven at 0930 under piercing blue skies and an outgoing tide.  Lynnhaven provides temporary shelter for many ocean species but is know as a nursery for puppy drum and to a lesser degree, speckled trout, stripers and flounder.  We came armed with medium-spinning gear and all manner of soft plastics rigged with jig heads + 8wt fly rods hoping to find fish with our spinning rigs and catch a few on long rods. This is lovely water but again there's so much of it it was hard for us to target and after 5 unfruitful hours we only had a 12" blue fish to our name, caught on a spinner bait.   We learned to bring a cast net and to be prepared to fish cut bait on circle hooks just off the grass beds if we wanted puppy drum and that besides a resident population of small trout the trout season here warms up in October.

Stymied and sun/water burned we headed back across the 64 bridge/tunnel to beat the tide of traffic and try our luck just over the Rt 17 bridge northeast of Gloucester, VA at Browns Bay.   The always amazing site of big deck carriers in port at Norfolk was over our left hand shoulder as we crossed the bridge.

Browns bay feels about as far away as you can get from NOVA and civilization, this is the land that time forgot and I suspect that 45 did pretty well in this rural area.    The water was just beautiful as we paddled out from the boat launch you can see at 8:30 in the map below, but despite a few exciting top water attacks we couldn't put a fish in the boat.

After retiring back to Williamsburg we 'watered' down at Buffalo Wild Wings and settled into our quickly scheduled fantasy draft...who knows, maybe less research will lead me to victory....it frequently seems to work for brother Tim! Friday morning found us again crossing the Rt 17 Bridge  Yorktown to Gloucester and heading even further into remote Virginia.   A new fishing friend had sent us a link to a kayaking adventure where the boaters commented that their were fishing jumping out of the water -- not today as the winds raised serious whitecaps on the water and we were relegated to small canal/inlets to avoid the wind.   We did find some predator fish slashing prey fish but we couldn't get themk to bite (boy did we try).

All in all this was a great recon where we learned some lessons and reinforced how much there is that we don't know and how much water is in the lower Chesapeake watershed...amazing diversity.   Next time I plan to invest in a guide as much for the education as for the fish.