Fishing Report

Date	May 30
Location	Broad Creek, Fox Ferry
Water Temp	72
Visibilty	1 foot

Finally managed to get back out on the water. Tried a number of times but work, weather, and -- yes, I admit it -- just plain laziness prevented it. I was expecting that the river would be a parking lot but it was surprisingly vacant in the morning.

I didn't get on the water until about 8:00 or so. I expected that there would be a huge glob of people heading out early (club tournaments, pleasure boaters, etc.) and I like to steer clear of such things. I was shocked to find no more than a handful of trailers sitting in the marina. Where the hell was everybody?

I caught a keeper on the very first cast

First stop, as is frequently the case, was the big barge in Broad Creek. I almost always stop there if there's nobody around and the creek was empty. What I normally do is troll over to the front of the barge about a cast or so from the front of the above-water debris. I'll work the mouth of the barge, then back off and hit the invisible debris on the bottom. This time I decided to do things a little differently. I sat off to one side and cast perpendicular to the front of the barge, fishing the sunken debris first. I figured that between the cold weather the past couple days and the time of year that it might pay to approach a little more cautiously. And it did. I caught a keeper -- somewhere between 2 and 2.5 lbs -- on the very first cast.

I very rarely catch anything on the first cast. I imagine that most people are like that -- many casts and few fish adds up to a small likelihood that any particular cast will result in a fish, let alone a keeper. On the rare occasion when it does happen for me it almost always means that I won't catch anything for the rest of the day. If I hadn't already paid my $10 ramp fee (highway robbery!) I might very well have gone home at that point.

I didn't get anything else out of Broad Creek. I did miss one on a Carolina Rig and a couple swirled at my spinner bait but didn't take it. From there I headed up to the barges north of the Wilson Bridge. On any normal Sunday there would have been at least half a dozen boats sitting there already with more trying to squeeze in. Today there were only 3, counting me. Shocking. I was able to fish the barges as well as I wanted without crowding anyone or being crowded by anyone. I didn't get any bites mind you, but I was able to not get them at my leisure.

After that I fished the point between there and the Spoils for a while as well as the main concrete island in the front. Nothing doing. I debated going home at this point but I knew low tide would be soon and my plan all along had been to try and fish Fox Ferry at low tide so I decided to stick around. Good move.

Unless I missed something low tide didn't get very low. It's possible that I misread the tide chart or something, I guess. Low tide on Washington Channel (which should be a few minutes after where I was) should have been at 12:22. Who knows. Blame the moon.

Anyway, I took my time being the ONLY BOAT there. (This NEVER happens. Never.) I worked my way up to the structure hoping to "pick off" any aggressive fish hanging upstream while the tide was moving. Didn't get anything until I cast right up on top of the rocks, towards the Maryland side. I caught a very nice keeper -- about 4 lbs by my guesstimate -- on a Carolina rig. Had no idea it was such a nice fish until it got right up to the boat -- and promptly went right under the boat. I was able to coax her out from under then into the boat. That's my best Potomac fish in quite a few years.

What I didn't do -- and I'm kicking myself -- is take my freaking phone out of my pocket and take a picture of the fish. I'm really a butthead sometimes.

I fished the rest of the outgoing tide and the first bit of the incoming but didn't catch anything else.

The trip back to Ft. Washington was, well, a little more exciting. Apparently all the pleasure boaters had finished with their barbecues and decided to head on out onto the water. It was a choptacular traffic jam, boats everywhere. I eventually managed to get around the congestion and head back into the marine, but not without hitting somebody's wake really wrong. Man, I hate when the boat is in the air sideways.

I flipped the docks in the marina for a bit but there was nothing going on there so I called it a day.