www.roanoke.com

In October of 2004, my buddies Bobby Hogan (left), Kraig Cesar (second from left) and I spent a few days camping on the shores of Lake Moomaw and bowhunting the surrounding mountains.

We called it Bow Camp, and the day the short trip ended we immediately started planning to go again the next year.

Well, the next year came and went. As did the next. And the next.

This year we finally made it happen again. Joining the original trio was Kraig's friend Cliff Bruner (to my right), a Navy SEAL who, like Kraig, lives in Virginia Beach.

We headed out for the public land hunt on Oct. 4 and came back four days later. It was a good trip, but a tough one.

How tough? Toward the end of the trip I asked Cliff if he'd consider doing it again. His answer was, "I'll tell you after we get out of here."

This shot was taken at the end of our canoe "paddle" out of camp on the final day. I put "paddle" in quotes because we spent about as much time out of the canoes dragging them through shallow water as we did in them actually paddling.

The trip in was the worst. It took nearly five hours. We had to drag our gear-laden canoes for much of the way. Dragging through shallow water was not the worst of it. The river was blocked in many areas by fallen trees. We cut out the smaller ones with a hand saw, but had to drag over others.

There was much cursing, plenty of it directed at the guy who picked the hunt location. (That would be me.)

Once we stopped for the day and got camp set up, things improved. Camp was pretty comfy, which it should have been considering all the stuff he hauled in there.

We hunted the next two mornings and evenings, and it was pretty good. The acorn crop was very spotty but Bobby, who lives in Roanoke and is a frequent hunting partner of mine, was able to find some white oaks that had hit pretty well. As you bowhunters know, when you can find a good white oak stand in a spotty mast year you will probably see deer. And we did.

Among the four of us we saw a total of probably 15 deer in our two days of hunting. Had we been hunting some of our private land spots we probably would have seen that many in an evening. But this is public land, remember.

Not only did we see deer -- though not a single antlered buck of any size -- we got shots at deer. Bobby and Kraig both killed does. Bobby, who killed a doe at Bow Camp 2004, made sure we all knew he is now two-for-two.

Not surprisingly, we didn't see any other hunters, though we did find evidence of other hunters.

So, where did we hunt? I'll let that remain a mystery for now. I plan to write a story about our trip for Friday's Outdoors page in The Roanoke Times and the story will include the location.

I don't mind sharing the location. I just don't think many hunters are going to be jumping to physically beat themselves up like that to see a handful of does. I'm not sure we'd do it again, either. But a trip like this is about more than just seeing deer and maybe getting a shot at one. If a hunter is willing to pay the physical price to seek those rewards, more power to them.

I hoped to get back into this by posting a shot of me with a nice stringer of triggerfish I caught during our Outer Banks vacation, which just ended yesterday. However, that picture is on my little Canon PowerShot G9 camera, which I can't find.

I'm hoping the camera turns up but I have scoured my bags and my truck and I'm pretty doubtful. I guess it might have ended up on the floorboard in its little soft case and then kicked out at some point either Saturday or Sunday. Foolishly, I didn't have it labled, so if that happened it's gone forever. Fortunately, we didn't have too many shots on it because I mostly used another camera.

The fish picture wasn't special. Just me holding up a stringer with six 2-pound triggerfish on it.

A day earlier I had gone for a swim from the beach near the cottage north to the pier at the Army Corps of Engineers research facility at Duck. The pier isn't open to the public (except for guided tours) but you can walk under it on the beach, and fish and swim around the thing. Not many people do because there is no beach access for maybe 500 yards on either side of it so people just don't go there to set up there beach camps.

As I was getting out of the water I saw a guy in snorkle gear with a speargun. I started talking with him (Brett from New Jersey) and he said he was getting ready to go out after triggerfish and spadefish. I asked if I could tag along.

We swam maybe 100 yards out and set up his dive flag, then went toward their pier. Within a few seconds he had a 2-pound triggerfish on his spear.

He had a stringer on his dive float, but getting the fish on it wasn't simple. Triggerfish have just a tiny gill opening and there's no way to thread a stringer hook through it. So he had to cut a hole in the bottom on the jaw and pop the stringer hook through that. I was helping him when I got careless and got my thumb near the fish's mouth.

Has anyone seen the teeth on a triggerfish? Think horse teeth -- but sharp. The fish got me good. Had it been a little closer to the end of my thumb, it probably would have nipped the whole end off. As it was, it was a couple of deep gouges.

Brett ended up getting four triggerfish on that first run before he headed in to put them in a cooler. I headed back down the beach with grand ambitions to get an inexpensive pole spear at a local dive shop and come back the next day.

By the next morning I'd come to my senses (in part because the nearest dive shop was 20 miles south) and decided that it would probably be better for me to just fish there. So I rented an Ocean Kayak Scrambler, bought a container of shrimp for bait and got ready.

About 10 a.m. I paddled the mile north to the pier, put a shrimp on the hook and dropped it next to a piling about 150 yards off the beach. Instant hit. But no fish.

Triggerfish are also notorious bait stealers and hooking them can be tricky. Eventually I hooked one and it put up an awesome fight. They are platter shaped, like sunfish or spadefish, and they use it to their advantage. I've caught only a couple of spadefish, but I think triggers fight every bit as hard.

But the time I dealt with the fish (it's pretty interesting to have a snapping triggerfish in a kayak with you) I had drifted 100 yards farther north. I paddled back and repeated the process.

The short of it is I got a hit every time the bait went down. I caught probably 10 fish, and kept a half-dozen. I ran out of real shrimp pretty quickly but I found that Berkley Gulp shrimp was just as effective and much more durable.

While the action was fast at the pilings, huge pods of bait were all around me in the open water, and schools of bluefish were blitzing them from time to time. Eventually I tied on a spoon and fooled with them for a bit, but the blues were just little so I went back to the pilings.

I repeated the trip the next day with similar results. Paddling back south against a stiff breeze that afternoon was a real chore so I wasn't too eager to go again. As it turned out, with the swell from Hurricane Bill picking up daily, that was pretty much the end of the ocean fishing window anyway. 

Then it was time to catch some waves. But that's another story...

Despite the heavy rain we've gotten, the Saturday Roanoke River float planned by the Float Fishermen of Virginia is still on. Ken Ingram, the float's organizer, sent below note earlier today. I'm just posting it now because I've been out on an assignment (getting soaked) all day. The event starts at 9:30 a.m. at Rotary Park in Salem, just downstream from the intersection of Apperson and Electric Road.

The article today was great. I've gotten quite a few calls today so the word is getting out.If you have time to get something in the paper, please remind people to bring safety gear."

A reader - aka "Concerned" -- posted this comment on a different, unrelated topic. I didn't want it to get buried because it's an interesting, important topic. As the reader suggested, it's one that would be worth my looking into if I could make it happen.

"Mr. Taylor,

As a fellow paddler I am sure you have heard of the "King's Grant" laws in VA as they pertain to public use of rivers, streams, and creeks. As a fellow fisherman I am sure you know of the headaches this has caused in the past below Lake Moomaw.

In 2008 there was hope as the commonwealth was close to appointing a committee to research, review, and update the out of date law. But as far as budgets are concerned there was no way to fund this committee (and all the others) and the issue was dropped. Little hope remains for this issue to be looked at in 2009.

I challenge you to delve into the politics of this law and why exactly we would want to protect and endorse this law that effectivly grants the actual water rights and water beds to individual land owners.

I will agree that the law has validity for landowners that need to use streams and creeks for drinking water or for watersheds that are simply too small to fish or boat on. But other creeks and even rivers are currently 'off limits' due to the threat of tresspassing charges, etc.

These watersheds are not just your simple trickle of water past a landowners house, but navigatble in fact waterflows that run at flows favorable for boating or fishing nearly year round. When the gov't deems a wateshed navigatable it looks at the past usage of the watershed and if it was ever used as a 'mode of transportation' for people or goods.

 Well fast forward to now. We are in a technological revolution. Alot of gear is used regularly now that did not exist even 10 years ago. Many enthusiasts regularly push the limit on what can be tried, done, accomplished, etc.

If we are deeming a waterway navigatable by how many logs were floated down it 200 years ago, how can that compare to what is being done now with current boats and technology? How can we sit back and pay taxes to build reservoirs, dams, & levees to control floodwater and protect the public and then simply be content with that same waterflow being completely granted over to a private landowner downstream?

Why do we help fund gov't programs to farm raise trout and release them into natural streams only to let them wash downstream into 'private' 'kings grant' 'no access' areas? As a lover of our mtn waterways i think it is time that we fought back agaist the 'commonwealth crux' that has hurt the paddling and fishing community in VA."

Have you ever seen a good bluefish blitz? The kind where a school of big chompers just attacks a school of prey? It's unreal.

I felt like I was in the middle of a blitz on Sunday when, after getting some project supplies at Home Depot, I swung into the soon-to-close Sportsman's Warehouse.

The place was an absolute zoo, with lines at that registers that stretched back toward the middle of the store.

Now, I could understand a buying blitz if everything in the store was 50 percent off. But most of what I saw was discounted 10 percent, although fishing terminal tackle was 20 percent off. The best I saw was 30 percent off hunting clothes, some of which already had previous discounts.

Now, 10 percent is better than nothing, 20 percent is getting somewhere and 30 percent is good. But the 10- and 20 percent discounts have been common at the store. All you had to do was get your hands on the discount cards SW handed out like candy at outdoors events and meetings.

The only thing I can figure is that everybody showed up looking for killer deals. When they saw the huge crowds they figured they better get in on the action, even without killer deals, for fear the items they were after would quickly sell out.

"I've had my eye on this tin of pellets for a while but I just couldn't do it when they were $3.99. But now that they're $3.60, I'm all over it! Yeah, man! I saved 40 cents! Now I excuse me while I go spend the next half hour in line."

Strange.

There's no shortage of "(Insert activity here) for a Cure" events these days.

The hope is people will be more generous with charitable giving if there's something fun involved.

I don't have a problem with the concept. There are lots of good causes out there. If this helps them raise money, great.

On Aug. 19 Class VI River Runners in Lansing, W. Va., will host the sevent annual "Rafting for a Cure" to benefit breast cancer research. The company started the event after Janet Proctor, wife of company partner Jeff Proctor, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The cost is $100 per person, or $760 for an eight-person raft.Last year's event netted more than $8,300. For more information call (800) 252-7784 00.

www.class-vi.com

The heavy rains we were warned about finally got here last night. It poured in Roanoke all night. The region's rivers are howling.

Here are some figures: Roanoke River flow in Roanoke: 1,020 cfs; median: 125 cfs. James River at Lick Run: 17,000 cfs; median: 648 cfs. In short, big rivers are pretty much blown out for anyone but expert paddlers. Creeks are another story, and could be good for a few days depending on where the expected storms dump more rain.

Meanwhile, water was flowing in the sports department office here at The Roanoke Times. My computer is one of the few in here that isn't covered by a plastic bag to protect it from roof leaks. The floor is soaked. We have a dehumidifier running full blast but I think it's going to smell pretty rank in here in a couple of days.