Potomac Fever
Some people look at the slimy northern snakehead and see an ecological scourge. Derek Radoski and Steve Chaconas see big bucks.

By David A. Fahrenthold
Sunday, July 8, 2007

IN A MUDDY BRANCH OF A MUDDY INLET OF THE POTOMAC RIVER, the prey finally showed its ugly face. It popped up in a scum-surfaced canal between backyard boat docks -- a green head coming up for air. Gulp.

"There's a snakehead right there," said Steve Chaconas, surprised and suddenly focused. From the deck of a bass boat the color of a ruby slipper, Chaconas and another fisherman, Derek Radoski, started flinging their lures in the fish's direction. They cast and then reeled back in, trying to tempt the fish out of the natural caution that tells it not to bite odd, little creatures attached to a translucent line that drops out of the sky.

Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. The two men's lures hit the water within inches of where the fish's head had been. Not a bite.

Then the fish popped up again. "Is that him, that just surfaced right there?" Radoski asked. He was using a lure that looked like a purple worm, fitted with a sharp metal hook and rubbed with goo from a tube that claimed it was scientifically proven to attract fish.

"I think it was," Chaconas said.

"Little bastard," Radoski said. "Bite the purple worm!"

Most people along the Potomac look at the toothy, slimy northern snakehead and see an invasive species, an ecological nightmare. Chaconas and Radoski see something else: dollar signs. In a country that spends at least $34 billion a year on recreational fishing and has made catching bass a multimillion-dollar obsession, they believe snakeheads are poised to become the next big thing in freshwater fishing. All it will take, they say, is a greater awareness of how big snakeheads grow and how hard they fight. Once that happens, hooking snakeheads will inspire just as much fervor among the nation's 34 million recreational anglers as hooking bass. Maybe more. "It's like people who go hunting for deer," Radoski says, predicting how the snakehead will change the game for the Potomac's anglers. "And then you find a carnivorous, fanged deer that's hopping through the woods."

"For a guy to come out here and catch one of these," Chaconas agrees, "it's another notch in their gunbelt."

And if the Potomac's snakeheads become the next big thing in freshwater fishing, Chaconas and Radoski want to become the first big thing in snakehead angling. Chaconas, a radio personality-turned-fishing guide who once wrote for Howard Stern, envisions a flood of new customers. Radoski, a security systems salesman and would-be entrepreneur, wants to build a business selling snakehead-fishing gear. But before they can cash in, they need to figure out how to catch snakeheads on a regular basis. And that was proving harder than expected as they eyed their prey from Chaconas's boat.

The snakehead was no longer gulping just air. It was thrashing around and roiling the water, apparently feeding on a group of tiny fish. Radoski and Chaconas threw their lures at the fish again. Cast and retrieve. Cast and retrieve. Nothing.

"He's eating pretty good over there," Chaconas said, conceding the obvious.

"He is."

"Like an Applebee's over there," Chaconas said.

"And he has no mind of us."

Splash. The snakehead was still eating.

"Why," Radoski pleaded, "don't you bite the purple worm?"

FROM THE SURFACE, THE LOWER POTOMAC RIVER STILL LOOKS STUNNINGLY PRISTINE. Outside of the stretch from the Key Bridge to the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, where it is lined with monuments, parkways and close-clipped grass, the river runs mainly through canyons of tall trees. Downstream of Washington, it's not hard to stand on the bank and imagine John Smith sailing by in 1608, mapping the Virginia wilderness.

From under the water, though, the Potomac looks like Casablanca, 1941. It's full of refugees, colonists and would-be conquerors, all of them on the make. Many of the creatures from John Smith's time -- migrating shad, prehistoric-looking sturgeon, huge reefs of American oysters -- are now barely tolerated guests in their native ecosystem.

People, of course, imported the invaders in spasms of let's-see-what-happens and what-could-it-hurt. Largemouth bass, native to other sections of the country, were stocked in the river for sport fishing in the mid-1800s. Ditto for blue catfish, a Mississippi River native, in 1905. For years, it seems, state wildlife agencies were run with the mentality of a 12-year-old boy: " Wouldn't it be cool if we . . .?" Even piranhas have been spotted in the Potomac, presumably dumped from somebody's aquarium, though they don't seem to survive mid-Atlantic winters.

Perhaps the best way to examine the Potomac's mismatched menagerie -- short of draining the river -- is to zap the water with 10 amperes of electrical charge, then wait a few seconds to see what rises to the surface. This is called "electrofishing": a less lethal version of the old dynamite-in-the-water trick and strictly off-limits to regular anglers. It's allowed, though, for scientists trying to survey the river's inhabitants. So, early one spring morning, two Virginia Tech fish researchers, Ryan Saylor and Nick Lapointe, set off into Pohick Bay, a Potomac inlet near Lorton, in a boat with a generator in the stern and two sets of wires dangling off the bow.

They steered into the shallows, where fish couldn't dive deep to escape. Then the researchers turned on the juice. The generator rumbled. After a few seconds, something splashed on the right side of the boat: a writhing long-nosed gar, which resembles a needle-nosed alligator. It looked otherworldly, but gars belong in the Potomac. Then the real aliens appeared. Catatonic bass with their white bellies showing. Fat, scaly carp, which tipped up rigidly and then sank like torpedoed battleships.

Then a splash got everybody's attention. On the boat's left side, a monstrous green fish -- the size of a limbless dachshund -- catapulted out of the bay. Saylor jabbed a long-handled net into the water and came up yelling.

"That is a PIG!" he shouted to Lapointe, who was steering the boat. Saylor looked back at the creature suspended in the mesh of his net. Upon closer inspection, it looked like a two-foot section of boa constrictor with fins. "That is a big fish, dude!"

It was an eight-pound, nearly 27-inch specimen of Channa argus, a predator native to East Asia. This fish was first discovered in the Potomac in May 2004. By that time, the northern snakehead needed no introduction in the Washington area. This was Frankenfish.

That name came from the snakehead's first appearance in an Anne Arundel County pond. Around 2000, a man who lived in Crofton had ordered two live snakeheads from an Asian fish market in New York, wanting to make his sister, who was ill, a pot of snakehead soup. But the sister got better before the fish hit the pot. The snakeheads, a male and a female, were set free in the pond. They made babies.

In 2002, an angler caught one of the fish, setting off a panic. Scientists reported that the snakeheads could crawl across land, breathe air and eat anything. "It's the baddest bunny in the bush," one Maryland biologist said.

The state tried fish traps and electro-shocking to get rid of them, before finally going to the "nuclear option." The pond was filled with milky poison, killing the snakeheads and everything else. The final body count showed that in two years, two snakeheads had become more than 800.

The hubbub inspired two straight-to-cable movies, both of which featured enormous snakeheads chowing down on people. But in real life, scientists exhaled after Crofton: The threat seemed to be over.

Then the bad bunnies started turning up in the Potomac. In early May 2004, a 12.5-inch fish was caught in Little Hunting Creek, a tributary near Mount Vernon. Several days later, a foot-long fish was caught in the Potomac near the Charles County shore. A few days later, a third was hooked near Occoquan.

Now, three years later, the range of the Potomac snakeheads starts in Northeast Washington, at the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens on the Anacostia River, and extends about 45 miles downriver to Aquia Creek, in Stafford County. In between, scientists say, there could be hundreds or even thousands of snakeheads, though some of Frankenfish's original hype has turned out to be overblown. They can't, for instance, waddle any significant distance on land. They haven't eaten every other fish in the river. But they are odd, adaptable beasts: Snakeheads can breathe air and can survive for hours or even days out of water. They have gnarly rows of sharp teeth in their mouth, and even in their throat -- not for chewing prey, apparently, but to make sure the things they vacuum down can't wriggle their way out again.

There are 29 species of snakeheads spread from Iran to Siberia, with the biggest concentration in Southeast Asia. A lot of people farm them for food -- the northern snakehead is grown in ponds in China, then sold alive to fish markets -- and a few people, mainly Western or Japanese tourists, catch them for fun.

Researchers still aren't sure how northern snakeheads wound up in the Potomac. Most people guess that two or more were dumped out of aquariums somewhere near Mount Vernon. Then those few became many, and they started their colonization in a pair of tributaries on either side of George Washington's estate. They have thrived: Unlike other snakehead species, this one can live through an icy winter.

"Now they're over 75 kilometers of river. That's pretty successful," for just a few years' breeding, says Steve Minkkinen of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Already the snakeheads are getting very, very big. In May, Minkkinen was out electrofishing in Dogue Creek and saw a monster that escaped his net. He estimated the fish weighed 20 pounds. (The International Game Fish Association's record for northern snakeheads, set by a fish hooked in Japan in 2004, is 17 pounds, 6 ounces.)

Some scientists and bass fishermen fear that, in the coming years, the snakeheads' expansion will come at the expense of largemouth bass (both are nonnative, of course, but the bass's longer tenure in the river and its value as a sport fish have put the state on their side). The newcomers might eat the bass's young, they say, or -- because the two species prefer similar spots in which to hunt and spawn -- the larger snakeheads might simply crowd the bass out. Some anglers think they're already seeing a decline in the bass fishery in such snakehead hot spots as Dogue Creek. And some scientists worry that, if snakehead fishing takes off in the Potomac, somebody might purposely dump the fish into another body of water, and start the cycle over again.

To prevent snakehead mayhem, D.C. area officials organized a "roundup" in 2004, recruiting some of the river's leading fishermen to go after the invaders. There was Cliff Magnus, a woodworking artist from Waldorf, who had already caught a six-pound snakehead. There was Tom Woo, a stay-at-home dad from Fort Belvoir, who had once caught three snakeheads in 10 days. And there was Chaconas, who was then so worried about the snakeheads' impact on bass that he helped persuade extra fishermen to participate.

The anglers roared off from a marina near the Pentagon with what sounded like an easy mission: Catch as many of the it'll-eat-anything fish as possible. When the boats returned later that day, they had hauled in a lot of bass and other fish. But not a single snakehead.

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").

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.