Potomac Fever

DEREK RADOSKI CAUGHT HIS FIRST SNAKEHEAD IN 2004 BY ACCIDENT. It was on Little Hunting Creek, a weedy inlet bordered by suburban homes and green lawns. Radoski, now 36, grew up here. His parents bought a house across the street from Little Hunting Creek, where Radoski caught his first fish at age 5. He and his brothers fished from a small boat or from the bank, and used worms or chicken livers or balled-up pieces of bread for bait.

As a young man, he fished for bass in the Shenandoah River and eventually entered a few small-time bass tournaments on the Potomac. He won one on the Ohio River in 1997, thanks to a lot of luck and five fish totaling 12 pounds. But Radoski gave up tournament fishing not long after that. He says competing took away what he liked most about fishing: the peace and the relaxation, "basically my own kind of Zen meditation out there."

Seven years ago, Radoski and his wife, Candace, bought his parents' old house in Fairfax County, and he sought to get reacquainted with his childhood fishing hole across the road. So he hired Steve Chaconas, who runs the National Bass Guide Service in Alexandria. They became friends, and Radoski stayed a client. That was how Radoski came to be fishing for bass on Chaconas's boat on a day in July 2004 when a big, ugly fish would alter both their lives.

That day, Radoski was using a lure that looks like a small frog, flinging it out and then dragging it slowly back to tempt the bass into making an ambush attack from some hiding place. He felt something big bite the frog. Radoski thought it was a five-pound bass -- as big as the biggest bass he had ever caught, about as big as any Potomac fisherman can reasonably hope for.

He compares what happened next to "taking a . . . pit bull for a walk on a kite string." After a brief but thrilling fight, Radoski reeled the fish into the boat and found a mottled-green creature with enough teeth for three fish. That's a snakehead, Chaconas told him. They handed the nearly 5-pound fish over to Virginia state authorities, who were trying to keep count of every snakehead found in the river.

Immediately, Radoski was hooked on snakeheads. "After I did that," Radoski says, "it was like, 'Oh, my. I must do that again.' "

Radoski still looks a bit like the football player he was at James Madison University. His build, tall and big through the shoulders and torso, suggests the ability to run short distances and knock people down. After graduating with what he calls "a degree in inside linebacking," Radoski bounced around Washington's workforce: Old Town bartender, high-school drama teacher, Santa Claus at Ballston Common mall. Then a temp agency sent him to work in the warehouse of SST, a company that sells surveillance cameras and electronic security systems. Radoski worked his way up to head an eight-man sales force, pitching the company's products to government agencies, universities and corporate headquarters.

Sales, it turns out, is his calling. He has a football player's bluff confidence and an intuition for what customers will buy. He sees what they will want before they do. After Radoski battled his first snakehead in Little Hunting Creek, he realized he had found something that most fishermen were programmed to want: an exotic new adversary that grew huge and fought hard. The snakehead -- a freak, an invader, the river's scourge -- became his product, the fish of the Potomac's future.

"I would predict in five years that snakehead fishing would probably be one of the top five game fish that people would come to the Potomac for," he says, along with largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, catfish and striped bass. "I mean, these are monster fish."

About a year and a half ago, Radoski set up a Web site, http://www.snakeheadpro.com. It offers reports about where snakehead fishing is good, reviews of lures, and an invitation for fishermen to join the Snakehead Angling Society.

So far, Radoski says, about 150 people have joined. Some are local fishermen. Some are from Pennsylvania, where Channa argus has been found in a Philadelphia pond. And some are from Florida, where the bullseye -- a northern snakehead cousin native to India and Pakistan -- has been breeding in an inland canal system since at least 2001.

Last October, trying to become more of a snakehead pro himself, Radoski went to Southeast Asia for a week of fishing in a reservoir on the Malaysia-Thailand border. His guide was Jean-Francois Helias, a French expat living in Thailand who is, apparently, the great hunter of snakeheads (Helias declined a request to be interviewed for this article, calling a reporter's questions "too much work for free").