Amid the Mayhem of Breaking Fish, Best Keep a Calm Hand

We've been buzzing around the mid-Chesapeake Bay for a month or so looking for telltale signs of surface-feeding schools of rockfish and blues, which make for some of the most exciting fishing in this region. It's been a hard slog with little success so far, but that makes it all the more satisfying when things finally fall into place.

"There they are, and it's the real deal," Capt. C.D. Dollar said last weekend as he piloted his speedy 23-footer down Eastern Bay off the southern tip of Kent Island. Jeff Nicklason and I were up forward, scanning for seagulls diving on bait being driven to the surface by ravenous predator fish. But it was Dollar in the back who spotted the birds.

It was a cool, windy evening that felt like fall, even though the calendar said fall was still a week away. Ribbons of high cloud streaked the sky, burnished by a setting sun. Only one small boat was anywhere near. We pulled alongside to see how the anglers aboard were faring.

"We have to go in now but you guys should definitely stick around," the young man at the helm said. "We've been on 'em for an hour or so and they're really nice fish. They come up and go down again, but they're not done. They'll be back."

He reached in the cooler and hoisted a glistening, 30-inch rockfish. "This is what we've been catching," he told us.

Enough said. I felt my heart rate bump and reached for a casting rod. Nicklason took up station in the bow with a flyrod and Dollar put one itchy palm on the wheel and the other on the throttle. Where, oh where, could they be?

"There!" said Dollar, throttling up and spinning the wheel so the bow pointed due south, smack into whitecaps. Two hundred yards away, the choppy gray waters parted as dorsal fins and broad backs of keeper-size rock and blues sliced the surface, and terrified baitfish skittered for their lives. Birds were on the move, too, soaring in to pick off any bait that ventured too close to the surface.

At times like that you wonder what it must be like down below, with the silversides jumbled in a tight, fleeing ball, big fish slashing away at the margins, caterwauling birds crashing down from on high and the fishing fleet boring in. In this case, it was a fleet of one. We had it all to ourselves. Nothing could be finer.

Dollar cut the engine upwind of the churning scrum and let the boat drift silently into casting range. He had a light rod rigged with a silver spoon, I had a light rod with a white feather jig tied on, two feet below a one-ounce, in-line sinker. Nicklason sported a chartreuse Clouser minnow on 300-grain sinking flyline.

The beauty of breaking fish is that when it's right, almost everything works. Capt. Norm Bartlett used to make up flies on the spot out of dollar bills, just for laughs. The difficult part is calming yourself down.

The tendency in all that mayhem is to cast out, then reel back in like a maniac, because everything seems to be happening so fast. But the predators are looking for easy pickings, knocking off injured or dying bait as it helplessly oak-leafs down in the water column.

Dollar, who guides sport anglers when he isn't editing a fishing magazine, proved the calmest and got the first hookup, a bluefish of about three pounds. "I'm not fishing it fast," he said of his wobbling Tony Acetta spoon. "I take two or three turns on the reel, then let it fall. They're banging it on the drop."