Potomac Fever

Radoski paid about $2,500 for the flight and $3,000 for guide services and food. In seven days in the jungle, Radoski says, he must have caught more than 100 emperor snakeheads and giant snakeheads. Some weighed 14 pounds. Their sheer numbers made them easier to catch than the Potomac snakeheads, but they were still tough to hook.

From Helias, Radoski learned that the fisherman may feel only a slight tap on the lure when a snakehead sucks it in, or feel no tap at all, just a subtle movement of the line. When that happens, he was told, it is imperative to yank back hard on the rod to set the hook. Radoski says that the fish, when hooked, often dives down deeply and away, knocking into the trunks of submerged trees and sometimes pulling the small boat after them. A bass will fight, but it doesn't do that, he says.

The fishing party threw most of the snakeheads back but did eat a few that were injured while being reeled in. Radoski abstained at first, but after a few days (and a good look at the raw-ish chicken that was the other option), he says he came to like the way the firm-fleshed fish tasted in soups and off the grill.

Along with the tricks of catching the fish, Radoski also found a product to sell: a Thai-made fishing lure that looks like a small frog with a starburst of brightly colored rubber strings emerging from its posterior. To a snakehead, Radoski says, the lure looks like an amphibian chasing after tiny fish. Radoski sells about a dozen of the $25 lures a month through his Web site.

Besides that lure, he's planning to sell one that looks like a small snakehead with a little skirt-like device attached to ripple the water. It's supposed to catch cannibalistic adult snakeheads. "The skirt chaser," Radoski announces.

Of course, some would-be snakehead fishermen want more help than fake amphibians can provide. They want lessons, advice, a guide. Radoski couldn't do it; it would take too much time. So he turned to the man who was there when he caught that first big snakehead: Steve Chaconas.

"He knows where and how to catch them," Radoski's Web site says. The guide and his old client have become business partners of a sort: Both are committed to making money off the snakehead.

Chaconas, 51, has the easy manner, longish hair and sandaled feet of someone who hasn't sat at a desk in a while. He spent the first part of his career in radio. He was a writer for shock jock Howard Stern in Washington and New York in the early 1980s, even coming on the air to impersonate sportscaster Howard Cosell and campy "Hollywood Squares" staple Paul Lynde. After that, Chaconas was the host of personal-finance radio shows on Washington area stations. In 2000, Chaconas left radio for good.

"My bosses kept getting dumber and younger," Chaconas says. He turned what had been a side job, guiding clients on trips to catch Potomac bass, into an everyday gig.

Like Radoski, Chaconas learned to fish on the Potomac, catching catfish with his father and grandfather in the 1960s. He started going after largemouth bass here in the 1970s and got into bass tournaments in the 1980s. Eventually, he decided the competitions posed a conflict of interest for him: A tournament fisherman doesn't show anybody his best fishing spots, but that's precisely what a guide is supposed to do.

It turned out that Chaconas's old career in radio had left him well-suited for his new one. Even on a very good bass fishery such as the Potomac, where the Bassmasters professional tour makes frequent stops, fishing is still fishing. The bass don't bite often enough to keep you entertained for eight hours. That's the guide's job.

On his $40,000 boat, a glittery 20 1/2-foot "Laser Red" Skeeter ZX 225, Chaconas gives advice and answers questions, but mainly he fills dead air. He keeps a file of jokes at home, and he continually polishes his routine for maximum on-board laughs. On catching a snakehead for the first time: "At first, I didn't know what it was, because it was mean, it was slimy, it was nasty . . . I thought I had a lawyer." He also tells one about the time he was fixing his fish finder -- a device that uses sonar to detect fish under the boat -- in his driveway, when it seemed to show there were fish six feet under the concrete. "I lost six crankbaits trying to catch those fish," Chaconas deadpans.

Although he once wanted to wipe the snakeheads out, he now sees them as an opportunity instead of a threat. Over the last two years, about two dozen people have hired Chaconas to help them catch snakeheads. Almost all found the snakehead guide through Radoski's Web site. Chaconas won't divulge the names of his clients but says they include entertainers, media people and businessmen in Washington for trade-association meetings.

He charges about $400 to take two people fishing on a weekend day, and he always gives them a standard buyer-beware spiel: "Right now," he warns, "you will have a better chance, coming with me, of catching a snakehead, than you will with anyone else. But you still won't have much of a chance." And that's not him just being modest. Until recently, Chaconas says, none of his snakehead-fishing clients had caught one of the fish. "But we've caught bass," he says. "They're happy."

THE BASS PRO SHOP AT ARUNDEL MILLS MALL LOOKS BIG ENOUGH TO SWALLOW A HOME DEPOT AND STILL HAVE ROOM FOR A BEST BUY. It has a boat showroom, a shooting gallery and a fish tank as big as a swimming pool. Out front, a vending machine drops out little containers of bait.

The store's size is a testament to the national mania for bass fishing, which in the past 15 years has morphed from a sleepy recreational pastime to a televised, NASCAR-ized industry. Many of the patrons of the Bass Pro Shops around the country fantasize about competing in the Bassmaster Elite tour, a traveling troupe of fishermen who vie for $100,000 purses, slather their boats and fishing shirts with their sponsors' logos, and celebrate their wins in front of 10,000 fans at trophy-waving, pyrotechnic-showering weigh-ins.

There was considerably less frenzy than that on a Saturday in January when the Hanover store held its Angler's Weekend, a series of seminars for fisherman waiting out the winter. At the end of "Pitchin', Flippin' and Skippin'" -- a demonstration of casting techniques -- out came Radoski to lead a seminar on "Snakehead Angling." He had slicked-back hair, a microphone headset and the excited, booming manner of a late-night TV pitchman.

About seven people had gathered for Radoski's presentation, none of them snakehead anglers, all of them a little curious. Onto the screen, Radoski projected a picture of a 12-pound snakehead. "Imagine you're fishing for bass. You'd be happy with a four-pound bass," he said. "And WHAM!" Radoski promised that he would show them "proven techniques" for attracting that WHAM! which is what it feels like when a snakehead finally bites.

He clicked to a slide that read, "#1 Technique Piss Big Momma Off!" Fishermen going after snakeheads should look for a patch of river where it looks as if the water is being hit by its own tiny shower of rain, Radoski advised. "It looks like, all of a sudden, on a perfectly calm day, you'll see water boiling right in front of you," he said. Those are the snakehead's babies, he said, hundreds of them. The mother fish is pushing them up to the surface to make sure they breathe air. If you toss a lure into the middle of the babies, Radoski said, you can trigger maternal instinct and a forceful bite.

"It'll make your heart stop," he said, when Big Momma hits the bait.

He outlined other snakehead-fishing strategies, though none as entertaining as pissing Big Momma off. Not that it mattered. By the end of the day, five people at the seminar had signed up for the Snakehead Angling Society.

WHAT RADOSKI DIDN'T TELL HIS CONVERTS WAS THAT SINCE HIS FIRST, ACCIDENTAL CATCH THREE YEARS AGO, HE HAD CAUGHT ONLY ONE POTOMAC SNAKEHEAD. That was in the summer of 2005, a relatively small snakehead at two pounds. (Months after the seminar, he finally caught another, a 4.9-pounder hooked early last month.) He had had bites from three others, he said, but they all got away -- two by biting through the line, the other by fighting so hard that Radoski's metal hook was bent straight.

It wasn't for lack of trying. The day Radoski cast his purple worm at a snakehead, he and Chaconas also tried several other of their best snakehead secrets.

SNAKEHEAD SECRET: Look in slow water near the shore.

From the deck of Chaconas's bass boat, Radoski stared across Little Hunting Creek, surrounded by houses and lawns. "Dock, dock, dock, slow-moving water," he said, approvingly. "If I was a real-estate agent for snakeheads, this is prime real estate."

Shortly after that, his line went taut. A hit! He yanked back on the rod, cranked in the line and reeled in . . . a two-pound bass.

"See," he said, "you go snakehead fishing, you catch bass."

SNAKEHEAD SECRET: Cast your lure under docks and other structures.

Near a marina in Dogue Creek, the boat trolled up to a rotted old boathouse.

"There's gotta be somebody in that big old dock of the ages," Radoski said.

A few minutes later, it looked as though he might be right. Chaconas cast his line near a rotting, old hulk by the marina, and felt something bite the lure. He reeled in . . . a crappie, a fish whose name says it all.

SNAKEHEAD SECRET: When you feel a tap on the lure, yank back hard.

A few feet away from the scummy little channel where he had failed with the purple worm, Radoski cast again and thought he felt the telltale vibrations of a snakehead's bite. The WHAM! of a fighting-mad snakehead doesn't always come right away: Sometimes, at first, a snakehead's bite can feel like only a tap.

"Here we go!" he said. He pulled back hard, hoping to dig the hook into snakehead gullet.

But instead, his lure -- without a snakehead or any other fish attached to it -- came flying out of the water at high speed. It was headed right back toward Radoski, who reached up, caught it and muttered an expletive.

Then Radoski cast the lure back to the same spot.

"Do that again, Mister Fishie," he said.

THREE DAYS LATER, CHACONAS WAS BACK ON THE RIVER WITH A PAYING SNAKEHEAD-HUNTING CUSTOMER. Dan Lewis, 38, is a fundraiser for nonprofit groups, who lives in Bristow, in Prince William County. He hires Steve as a guide about 12 times a year. Usually they fish for bass, but on this day the target was different. Lewis had been telling co-workers and in-laws: I'm going after snakeheads.

"It's kind of a challenge, which I like," Lewis said. "Plus, then, I'd get to talk about how I caught a snakehead. It'd be neat to catch one, you know, take a picture of him." He was certainly not going to be taking any fish home with him -- his wife told him she wouldn't allow a snakehead in the house.

From the marina, just south of Alexandria, Chaconas roared down the river at highway speeds, turned into Dogue Creek and slowed the boat to a putter. He gave Lewis the snakehead basics: They were going to use spinnerbaits, with rotating metal pieces that are supposed to vibrate and flash like little swimming fish. They were going to cast up against banks, in shallow water, trying to tempt an ambush.

So, it's like fishing for bass, Lewis said.

"Yeah," Steve said.

They spent the next couple of hours trolling slowly along the edges of the creek, around tumbledown duck blinds and wooded banks. Lewis peppered the guide with questions: How fast should I reel in? What bait do they like? He got answers, and a couple of bass, but no sign of a snakehead.

Chaconas decided the fishing would be better on the other shore. Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. "All right, come on, snakehead!" Lewis said. They trolled along the docks, tossing lures up underneath.

"We know they're here. We know they're in high concentrations here," Chaconas said. He knows because he has talked to those Virginia Tech fish researchers who have implanted tracking devices in snakeheads and followed their signal here.

They changed lures. Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve.

Chaconas said, "I think the whole idea is: You just get close to 'em . . ."

". . . and just piss 'em off," Dan continued.

"Yeah."

They changed lures again. No snakeheads. It was about 10 a.m. Suddenly, Chaconas spotted something hiding underneath a little blob of floating muck.

"Get your camera!" he told a reporter who had tagged along. "There's a snakehead right there."

And sure enough, there was. Underneath the scum was the mottled outline of a young snakehead, about six inches long. It was just a few inches below the surface and just a few feet from the boat. Chaconas leaned his rod out and dropped his lure right in front of the fish's face. But instead of biting, the snakehead darted out of sight.

"They have more green to them than I thought," Lewis said, after this close encounter. "And some splotchiness."

They motored over to a marina in Dogue Creek. Lewis, now having learned the basics of snakehead habitat, noticed a little raft of debris and scum on the surface. "This looks like a good snakehead spot here," he said.

Cast. Retrieve. Nothing. The rest of the day, they caught only bass.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE WHO HAS REALLY MASTERED FISHING FOR POTOMAC SNAKEHEADS? The answer depends on what you mean by "fishing" and who you mean by "who."

If "fishing" includes standing on a boat with a bow and a fiberglass arrow, waiting to drive its barbed steel point through any fish that shows his face, then, yes: Robert Bowe is pretty good at snakehead fishing. Bowe, who owns an archery shop called Bowe's and Arrows in Alexandria, has "bowfished" for carp and gar on the Potomac for years. Then, last year, he was out near Fort Belvoir drifting silently through the lily pads when a snakehead stuck his head up.

"They are gulpers, you know. They come up to the top and gulp for air," Bowe says. When this one did, Bowe's arrow covered the distance from bowstring to fish in less than one-tenth of a second. In that one day, Bowe and two hunting partners shot four snakeheads, the biggest one a 10-pounder, which they turned over to the state. Bowe nailed two more in early June, including one snakehead that he says was in the middle of a slithering mating session.

If we include the wider Potomac fishing community -- those who use talons and beaks -- then the Potomac's most successful snakehead-catchers are probably its birds. When snakeheads come up to breathe, ospreys snatch them off the surface, and great blue herons spear them with bill tips. Scientists who capture snakeheads often find them with round, festering wounds: signs they had survived a bird's strike, at least temporarily.

But for hook-and-line anglers, who have to trick fish into biting, the Potomac's snakeheads have given away very few of their weaknesses. Do they have a favorite prey? Those Virginia Tech scientists, Lapointe and Saylor, have cut open snakeheads' bellies and found almost everything that swims or wiggles in the river: tiny banded killifish, white perch, yellow perch, mummichogs -- even an eel that seemed as long as the snakehead that ate it. They question the maxim that snakeheads only attack from behind. In one dissection, the scientists found a sunfish in the snakehead's belly, still facing in the direction it was eaten, head-first.

It's no surprise, then, that snakeheads don't seem to have a favorite bait. John Odenkirk, a snakehead specialist at the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, has heard reports of the fish being caught with enough fishing gear to fill a tackle box. They have bitten lures that spin, lures that gurgle, lures that sink, lures that wiggle across the surface. They've hit rubber worms, rubber grubs, rubber tubes -- and real night crawler worms. Odenkirk caught one himself last summer with something called a Rattlin' Chug Bug, which rattles and darts like a fleeing fish.

Odenkirk's conclusion: The snakeheads presumably know why, when and what they like to bite. But so far, they're the only ones.

"I'm not so sure . . . that the specific baits or techniques really matter," Odenkirk says. "If they're going to hit, I don't think it matters what you're throwing at 'em."

THE WEEK AFTER LEWIS AND CHACONAS HAD STRUCK OUT LOOKING FOR SNAKEHEADS, they were on the river again, along with Lewis's friend Erik Dias, the 36-year-old manager of a small telecom company. Though they were officially fishing for bass, snakeheads were still on Lewis's mind. The boat was trolling along the river's shoreline, north of Mount Vernon, and Lewis was tossing out a lure called a Mann's Baby One-Minus, which looks like a little red fish with two hooks attached. They had been on the water three hours already. Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. Cast and WHAM!

Lewis had a bite. It felt like a monster.

"I knew it wasn't a bass, almost immediately, because it didn't fight like a bass," he recalled later. Instead of struggling to get free, the fish was just a heavy weight on the end of the line, jerking occasionally. Lewis began reeling it in, bringing the fish about half the 20-yard distance to the boat. Suddenly, it made its move, zipping away and unwinding yards of extra line off Lewis's fishing reel. Lewis thought he had a large catfish on the line, a disappointment for a bass fisherman.

Then Lewis saw the fish itself: a brown, spotted flash beneath the surface. "I said, 'Oh, my God, that's a snakehead,' " Chaconas recalled.

Chaconas, thinking ahead, started frantically digging through the storage compartments hidden in the boat's deck, throwing extra rods out of his way. He wanted a net: You can pull a bass out of the water by its lip, but a snakehead has too many teeth. Lewis, in the back of the boat, started worrying. He knew he had talked a big game about snakehead fishing. He didn't want to come back with an it-got-away story.

"Now, I'm in a panic, because I'm thinking, 'I've got to catch this fish,' " he said. "The pressure was definitely on."

After its brief appearance at the surface, the fish took off again, stripping 15 or 20 feet of line off Lewis's reel as it went. But it eventually tired, and Lewis began to pull him in closer. Then the fish appeared again at the surface. This time, though, it wasn't just flashing by. It seemed to be staring at them.

"He came up, and he was right underneath the water, and he actually looked right at me," Lewis said. "He looked like half a Komodo dragon."

Finally, Lewis reeled the snakehead to the side of the boat, and Chaconas scooped it into the net. The snakehead was 27 inches long and weighed 5 pounds, 5 ounces -- three ounces lighter than the biggest bass he'd ever caught. Lewis and Chaconas high-fived. "Honestly, it was disbelief," Lewis said. "I know we were going for them, but I wasn't optimistic that we were going to catch one."

Now they needed to pull the hook out, but the snakehead wouldn't open its mouth. So Chaconas had to wedge a pair of closed pliers in there, then open them to force the jaws open. Throughout the hook extraction, slime was flying. Every time the fish wiggled, it threw off slime. Snakeheads' skin is coated with unusual quantities of the stuff.

"If you imagine a five-pound snail," said Dias, who was watching, horrified. "Like a slime trail from a slug, literally that was what was on the carpet of the boat.

"You could literally hear it banging its head against the door of the live well," Dias said. He said that Lewis, who was sitting on a seat that was almost on top of the well's door, kept looking down at the compartment. "He wanted to make sure the live well door was closed."

When their boat got back to the marina, there were pictures and retellings of the story. Lewis called his wife. "Honey, guess what I caught?" Chaconas heard him crow.

Then there was the question of what to do with the snakehead -- because they're invasive, authorities require that fishermen kill them. But Lewis, usually a catch-and-release fisherman, didn't want to do it. Finally, a guy hanging around the dock came forward and asked for the fish. He told them he wanted to make seviche, the South American specialty in which raw fish is marinated in citrus juice. All yours, buddy, they told him.

So that was it: the first great triumph of Washington's year-and-a-half-old snakehead industry. Somebody caught a fish. Afterward, Lewis seemed to be experiencing the rush that Radoski and Chaconas are counting on. He told his co-workers; he told his in-laws. "I did catch one," he told them, "and it was a monster, too.

"I have been bragging my head off," he said later. "I'm going to have to go to confession and tell 'em about hubris again."

Dias, though, had another reaction to the teeth and the slime and the thrashing. "Now, having seen one caught, I want no part of it," he said. His reasoning: "If you hook one of these things, then you have to contend with it."

And even in defeat, the snakehead left behind another mystery. In the live well, where the fish had been, Chaconas found odd little granules that the snakehead had apparently eaten at some earlier time, then regurgitated in its distress after it was caught. Little brownish blobs, with an oddly familiar look. Dog food, Chaconas concluded. Little pellets of dog food.

Now what the heck does that mean?

David A. Fahrenthold, who covers the environment for The Post's Metro section, can be reached at fahrenthold@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.