An Unseasonable Start

The early warm weather, combined with a prolonged dry spell, caused Potomac River water temperatures to reach April levels by Friday afternoon. It was time to ignore the calendar and head down to the river. Drawn by a familiar yet mysterious urge, a few of us appeared on the bank just upstream from Fletcher's Cove. I was just looking. Despite a lack of swirling current in the low, summer-like flow, conditions felt right for hickory shad to strike. As it turned out, a single American shad nearly beat them to it. 

Suffering from the winter doldrums, Douglas Romaine had been posting first shad predictions on the Tidal Potomac Fly Rodders (TPFR) forum since mid-February. Tongue firmly in cheek, he graphed and analyzed weather, river and fishing data from over the years to ascertain a certain date, March 19, for the first hickory shad catch. Then, like a good scientist -- he's an energy consultant with Siemens -- Doug attempted to disprove his theory on Friday the 11th. As a reward for his efforts, he promptly caught a small hickory shad after just ten minutes of fishing. But there was a problem: When I found him alone along the river a short time later Doug had no picture to show me. After wasting time going to the wrong location to pick up his Rock and Roll Marathon bib, he had quickly changed clothes and left the house with his phone still on the dresser. Now his catch could not be verified by one of the self-proclaimed arbiters of first shad catches, or anyone at TPFR for that matter. I decided to wait for him to catch a second shad to confirm the first. 

So it was that I ran back to the house to pick up my son Derek's old spinning rod. If I was going to hang around to confirm Doug's catch, it made sense to take some casts at the same time. Just minutes after my return I felt a familiar tug and some violent head thrashing from a fish that was not a hickory shad. The last shore fishing for shad I had done was on the Delaware last May, and this felt the same. Out of the shallow water appeared a flash of white, a small buck, the first American shad of the year. It came four days earlier than in 2012 and a month earlier than when I fished for shad as a kid. It is the earliest catch on hook and line ever seen at Fletcher's.