Things I Never Thought I’d See …

… or, why fly fisherman sometimes get a bad name with warm water fishermen.

Here’s the situation: my brother and I went to Weldon, NC last Friday on a striper scouting expedition. Weldon is the self-proclaimed “Rockfish Capital of the World,” and a quick call to Bobby Colston’s Tackle Box on Thursday afternoon provided us with the information that while the shad run was winding down, the stripers were beginning to arrive in the river in numbers.
We got to the Weldon put-in about 12:30 and had a sandwich in the parking lot watching the action below. The thing about the striper run (so we’ve been told) is that the best fishing is right there at the put it, and that the preferred method is to drive your boat up real close to the rocks, kill the motor and float downstream anywhere from a quarter to a half mile, and then fire up the motor and do it again. And again. And again. There are a couple of boats taking turns at this, including two guys with fly rods in jon boat.

So we watch for a while and then we get in the boat and cross the main channel and head to the other side of the river, where there’s a braid in the channel. My brother keeps an old New River (i.e., concrete) anchor in the bilge so we dropped that off the bow, taking care to keep the nose of the boat pointed upstream and letting the current push us from side to side. This is an old smallmouth river trick one of us learned years ago. We’re there long enough that this old muskrat swims by and climbs up on the rock so I take this picture:

At some point we look back over to the left and notice that the two guys with fly rods are back. They blast up into the channel, float down, and do it again. And again. They’re staying a lot closer to the rocks this time, floating only a couple of hundred yards at a time instead of the standard half mile.

A few minutes later either my brother or I one look over and we notice that they’ve dropped an anchor. “Pretty sporty,” he says. We go back to fishing the bank. “You ought to take a picture of that,” he says, and I look over to see the guy in the front of the boat has set his rod down and is pulling on the rope. Hard. “I think I’d cut that rope,” he says, and we make another cast.

I did not see what happened next, but I heard it. A bunch of hollering. When I do look over, and I see something I will probably never see again: the front half of a 16’ aluminum jon boat sticking straight up out of the river. Gear everywhere. And two heads bobbing in the current. The boat rolls, and is upside down – the anchor rope is still attached. Suddenly, the boat sinks, dragged down by the current. A few seconds later, it reappears, presumably because the anchor rope either parted or the current has ripped the cleat off the boat, and starts floating downstream.

For the record, we did hold a quick debate as to if we should go help. However, given that there were a half-dozen boats already headed towards the guys and the fact that we were in a tiny boat with a single-digit horse engine, we thought for our own safety we out to stay put. But I did (discretely) take this picture. So here, for the record, is what a 16’ jon boat looks like after it has turned turtle in the Roanoke River:

Blown up:

Postscript. On Sunday, my brother took the aforementioned single-digit horse engine in for service to a shop in Raleigh. While he’s waiting in line he hears another guy loudly telling the service tech a story of how the hydraulic in the rapid below Weldon caught hold of his boat and flipped it. My brother, not exactly known for his patience with idiots, called BS and quietly and directly reminded the guy that he had in fact dropped his anchor directly into the main channel of the river.