By Angus Phillips
Sunday, October 29, 2006; E03

With the Washington Wizards' season set to start on Wednesday in Cleveland and still no dominating center on the roster, fans may be pondering the whereabouts of a certain retired 7-foot-7 Romanian American. Where's Big Gheorghe Muresan when you need him?

Lest we raise any false hope, the sweet-tempered giant is not considering an NBA comeback at 35, though he'd do it if he could. The heart is willing but the legs aren't. "What I miss most is the feeling of going to the gym in great shape to play against the best guys in the world," he said on Thursday.

Muresan is the first to admit he's lost a step on the basketball court, but he hasn't lost the keen eye that makes him an asset on a fishing boat, particularly in the fall when flocks of birds are working over schools of feeding fish on the Chesapeake.

"He's our human tuna tower," says his old pal Billy Brener of Great Falls. From his perch on high, with the keen eyesight of a bird of prey, Muresan can spot clouds of working birds with the naked eye long before lesser mortals can find them with binoculars.

"To the left, 10 o'clock!" says Muresan, gesticulating urgently. And far in the distance over the whitecaps at the mouth of the Potomac River on a wild and windy day, if you strain your eyes you eventually find the clot of jittery black dots that signifies diving birds and rockfish on the feed.

So off you go, bouncing along through the angry three-foot chop on a 21-footer, until the birds are close at hand and the water below roils with the slashing strikes of feeding rock and blues. "I'm marking fish on the meter," says the skipper, Walleye Pete Dahlberg. "Get your lures down."

Bang. Fish on!

Ah, autumn. It's a magical time of year for the bay angler as fish feed up for the winter, and it's that much more magical with a would-be Wizard along.

Muresan loves to fish. He hooked up with Brener, who runs an office-building maintenance company in Arlington, back in the days when the Wizards were the Bullets and Muresan was holding court two or three nights a week against the likes of Shaquille O'Neal.

They were a good match. At 5 feet 3 1/2 , Brener and his wife, Linda, who's four inches shorter than he, needed help in the height department. Muresan became a regular on their 31-footer, Char Lady, when he could get time off from training and travel.

These days his time is largely his own. Muresan works in the summer running camps, clinics and leagues for kids around the area through his company, Giant Basketball Academy. In the winter he does public relations for the Wizards at home games. He says of his current obligations: "It's the best job I've ever had. I have plenty of time now to spend with my own kids," budding soccer players George, 8, and Victor, 6, at home in Potomac.

And plenty of time to fish.

Brener puts his own boat away at the end of the summer and leaves the cold-weather driving to others. Dahlberg is among the growing number of Chesapeake charter skippers who keep their boats on trailers so they can go where the fish are and keep busy all year. He'll work Maryland portions of the lower Bay into November, then head south to the mouth of the estuary to fish the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel off Norfolk through New Year's.

He's an advocate of light-tackle jigging, and the bigger the fish the better. He has a portfolio of photos of 20- to 40-pound rockfish taken by clients on light tackle from the Susquehanna Flats at the head of the bay to the Bridge-Tunnel at the mouth.

"I'm hoping we can get into some big ones today," he said as we forged out into the windswept Chesapeake from Buzz's Marina at St. Jerome's Creek. We didn't, as it turned out, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Dahlberg covered 30 miles and more of the churning Chesapeake hunting big fish, but all we found were medium-sized ones. After several stops around the Southwest Middle Grounds, where most of the fish were too small to keep, he found a hungry mass of rockfish clinging to a channel edge at Smith Point, Va., at the southern end of the Potomac, with plenty of keepers over 18 inches in the mix.

With a flood tide bucking up against strong northerly winds, the bay built a prodigious chop and it was all you could do to keep your feet. The challenge was double for Muresan.

When he stands up to fish, the gunwales we use to brace our thighs only come up to his shins. He's taller sitting down than Brener is standing up.

But we muddled through and by 2 p.m. quitting time had our limit of rockfish, one keeper bluefish and plenty to smile about.

Muresan made a reputation as a soft-spoken, gentle man during his years playing ball here, and it was not misplaced. It's not easy being 7 feet 7. Everywhere he goes, eyes grow wide and kids come running. Somehow, Muresan manages to take it all in stride; he'll pose for pictures till the film runs out.

He says he loves working with the kids at his camps. "I like to watch them grow," he says. "They learn so fast."

It's good that the Wizards have found a place here for Big Gheorghe. Even if he can't go thundering up and down the court any more the way he used to, he can still find fish for the little people like us.

* * *

Rockfishing is heating up as the Chesapeake cools off, and a number of skippers specializing in light-tackle jigging are geared up and ready to go, weather permitting.

Here's a list of a few:

Walleye Pete Dahlberg, 410-586-8340; Mike Critzer, 301-253-5505; Gary Neitzey, 410-557-8801; Skip Slomski, 410-746-6907; Kevin Josenhans, 410-968-3579; Richie Gaines, 410-827-7210; Norm Bartlett, 410-679-8790.