Charter Fishing in Virginia

Story By: Trick Standing
Date Added: 2008-08-11

I love living and fishing in Virginia. It is great to travel to Panama, Venezuela and other countries to experience some great deep sea fishing and meet new people but fishing in Virginia is home to me. I now count as friends people who I only used to see in magazines and on TV. I have made many fishing trips to North Carolina and there is no question that Florida is a great fishing state.

I talked my then new wife into stopping off there as part of our honeymoon because I wanted to catch a big bass. Her ten-pounder is still hanging on our wall after all of these years. I still have not caught a double-digit largemouth. I will keep going on these fishing trips but wherever I go, I am reminded how great we have it here in Virginia. We have such a diversity of world-class fisheries here and it almost seems like it is a secret. It probably has something to do with being in-between the well-publicized charter fleets of Oregon Inlet and Ocean City. Virginia is just not one of the places which gets listed in the magazines as the top choice to travel to for big time fishing charters. It should be.

I had the editor of one of the best national magazines ask me about a striped bass photo. He wanted to know did we normally catch big striped bass here. I said yes. There is nowhere better to target trophy stripers than Virginia during the wintertime. That secret is getting out. You can tell by all of the Maryland and North Carolina boats here in the winter. If I was an angler looking to get in on some good fishing, I would just call up a Virginia charter boat captain, tell him when you want to come, and ask him which of your world class fisheries is hot then. He will be able to give you several any month of the year. I don't have to do that, I live here. My problem is picking out what I want to fish for this weekend. Usually, we try to hit a number of different fisheries and run out of time.

This past weekend, some of my buddies decided to stay inshore for cobia, drum, and spadefish. All world-class fisheries which are hot right now. Where else can you go out for an evening and have a legitimate shot of boating 20 bull red drum in the 45 to 55 inch range? A group of us decided to leave the Chesapeake Bay and head out into the ocean yesterday for some awesome Virginia deep sea fishing. We still did not know what to fish for.

Offshore bottom fishing is just ridiculous, anytime you drop to the bottom, you have a decent chance at yet another world record so we brought stuff for that. Over the past week, the gaffer dolphin bite has been fantastic with 20-50 pound dolphin plentiful east of the Cigar and the blue marlin bite has been very good with boats having on average 2 to 3 shots a day. We brought stuff for that. The guys also showed up with a gazillion live spot and croaker. We started with those. We ran to the South Tower and caught a gazillion amberjack up to 53 inches long. The vast majority were about 44 inches.

The charter boat Git-R-Done was there doing the same thing. They even broke out the fly rod. Charter Captains, as a group, are super nice people and the better charter fleets will work together to help make sure that everyone is successful. The Virginia charter fleet does this and they take it a step further in that they will seek out and work with private boats out there. This is a big help in a big ocean. I cannot tell you how many times one of Virginia's excellent charter captains has made my day for me. Yesterday was no different.

Capt. Standing called me on the radio and talked to me about what I was doing next. Was I going bottom fishing? We were set for it and it is hard not to do. Many people head down to the Carolinas or Florida for some great offshore bottom fishing but the last five snowy grouper world records have been set off of Virginia along with a bunch of records for other bottom fish.

There is a charter boat waiting to take you out there to set yet another world record in yet another Virginian world-class fishery. I told him that we might do that but I had heard that the marlin bite was good and that I had a pop-up satellite tag with me in case we got lucky. He told me where to go and then he left the tower to us. Soon after, he calls me on the radio and tells me where he is and that he has already had two blue marlin in the spread. We ran out of live baits and went out to the area he told us. By the time we get out there, they had caught the 3rd blue marlin they saw that afternoon.

The few other boats out there all reported encounters with blue marlin in the 400-500 pound class. We got out there late but we caught some nice dolphin and then it was our turn at a blue. Chris Boyce got to catch his first marlin and I got to deploy a tag for Dr. Graves' blue marlin study. Thanks Git R Done! Only 52 tags to go. By the time Chris got his fish to the boat, it was time to go home. Next weekend is coming. All we have to do is figure out what we are going to fish for this time.