5.08.2011

Fishing on the Chowan

Treebeard and I fished the Chowan River last Monday. We caught a nice variety of fish, but we didn't keep any of them.  Several of the bluegill we caught were definitely big enough to keep though.




Something with a large mouth had hold of this bluegill at some point. Except for the nasty looking wounds, the fish seemed to be okay. Treebeard said it put up a fight when he caught it. I hope it heals up.

Around here this fish is known as a speckle or a speckled perch.  Some of you may call it a black crappie.

Only one largemouth bass managed to be caught during our trip.  Treebeard caught it.  That was fine with me.  I don't care much for bass.

Sometimes you see some odd things when you're fishing.  This shellcracker, a.k.a. redear sunfish, had an unusual shape.


I thought this pumpkin seed that I caught was the prettiest fish of the day.  The photo doesn't do justice to its colors.

My vote for least attractive fish of the day goes to this warmouth, a.k.a. chub robin or goggle eye.  You can see where the goggle eye name comes from, I don't know how chub robin came about.

We caught several yellow perch.  Raccoon perch is what folks around here call them.
They have a pretty red pelvic fin.


We also caught a number of white perch.  These are tasty fish :)


Last, but not least, here is the one robin that was caught.  These are also called redbreast sunfish.

We had a nice day on the river.  There were a few large power boats out, but the kayaks handled the wakes with grace.

6 comments:

Cindy said...

I would have taken those babies home and fried them up! They looked tasty!

swamp4me said...

Cindy,
Most of what we were catching was pretty small. A few of the bluegill and white perch were pretty good size though :)

Kirk Mantay said...

That's so cool, I fished the Chowan on the VA border about 2 months ago (caught 1 crappie and one largemouth). Those are all very respectable and quite edible fish.

On the fish wound, my default is to always say "heron beak" but that looks like a striped bass got ahold of it vertically and couldn't get the job done. He probably had to release his jawset for a moment to get the bluegill horizontal, which was enough for the bluegill to escape.

swamp4me said...

Swamp Thing,
We were only about a half mile from the state line. Maybe we will cross paths one of these days.

The wounds on that bluegill were pretty impressive. Whatever got hold of it had a big mouth ;)

R.Powers said...

You had me at "Fishing".
Beautiful fishes.

I bet the warmouth gave you the best fight ounce for ounce.

Neat mix of southern and northern freshwater species. The two perch don't swim down this far.

Wayne said...

Hi Swamp4Me. I enjoyed your blog. The marbled salamanders brought back memories from my childhood. We used to go down to a somewhat swampy area on the first semi-warm rainy evening in the spring and watch all the frogs and salamanders at work. Lots of large bluish grey salamanders as I recall.

I didn't see your email on your blog but I was wondering if I could use a picture from your website. I’ve put together an online Flash quiz about seven of the most common types of sunfish and thought your picture was a really good example of a Redbreasted Sunfish.

Specifically I’d like to use the image on http://swampthings.blogspot.com/2011_05_01_archive.html. A link to your site will accompany your picture in the quiz. The idea is to provide visitors to my site with something interesting and active and hopefully it will also send a few visitors your way.

If it’s okay just let me know. If not, I’ll remove the picture from the quiz (or if I don’t hear from you in a week I’ll also remove it). My email is on the page with the draft quiz (www.barblessfishing.com/sunfish-private/ - I can email you the password to start the quiz. I’ll remove the password once everything is in order so people can use the quiz).

Thanks,

Wayne