BY C.C. MCCOTTER
It had been a minute since I’d headed east on Interstate 64 to fish one of Virginia’s top largemouth bass fisheries; the tidal Chickahominy River. With the river fresh off the efforts of 78 Major League Fishing anglers that mostly caught the heck out of the river’s green bass, we headed to the ramp at Chickahominy Riverfront Park the morning of July 4 to see if it was as easy as Skeet Reese and Jacob Wheeler made it look.
My companion was my 22-year-old son, who has become quite the angler, and we were in the brand new Anna’s Marine Center TRACKER Grizzly 2072 equipped with a 150-hp Mercury 40-stroke, the new Minn Kota Ulterra Quest trolling motor and two, networked Humminbird Helix 10s. No fish was safe!
The tide had been rolling in for about a half hour when we launched at 7:45 am and we immediately commenced to catching fish in Gordon and Morris Creeks on duck blinds with bladed jigs from our friend Michael Seal ( (MES Lures).
Fishing tends to be very good the first hour of a tidal change, which occurs every six hours. The fishing tends to be toughest at high tide or during periods of slack tide. The tide for our visit wasn’t ideal as after the initial swing we would be fishing the high tide when fish would push back into marshes and creeks.
I had forgotten how dingy the water is on the lower Chick. The water was definitely a bit muddy from the tide pulling water swiftly across mud bottoms of the creeks we fished, but the bass thumped our lures hard as long as they were next to wood. I’ve fished the upper end of the Chickahominy quite a bit, too, where milfoil, hydrilla and Walkers Dam tend to combine to offer much clearer water. Down on the lower end of the river, don’t expect clear water, but you can expect plenty of bass on wood structure including logs and cypress knees.
Reese reportedly fished in the tidal Chickahominy during the four-day MLF tournament but his winning weights on the last two days mostly came from fishing the mouth of the Appomattox River and around the Benjamin Harrison Bridge from Rt. 5 over to Hopewell. Reese used a Lucky Craft shallow diving BDS 1.0 crankbait in six inches to two-feet of water as well as around bridge pilings and docks. On Championship Day Reese had 54-3 from 23 bass. I recognized where he was fishing from the live feed. David Dudley probably did, too, as he won a tournament or two back in the day in the same areas.
During our visit, the fishing was quite good for about 45 minutes and then we couldn’t buy a decent bite in those lower river creeks. Boat traffic on the main river was heavy as one would expect on a holiday, so we didn’t fish much there nor did we run too far from the launch ramp.
I think we should have put the Grizzly on the trailer at noon and launched out of Jordan Point on the James (just up Rt. 5) to fish where Reese did, but we stuck it out in 98-degree heat until 3 pm when my son said, “I don’t think I can fish anymore. I’m too hot.” I think the deck of the boat was well over 100 degrees.
The tidal Chickahominy River has had its ups and downs over the past 30 years. Experimental stocking efforts in the early 2000’s helped biologists understand this method could improve on poor year classes that had decimated the bass fishery. The F1/N1 hybrids stocked turned out to like the Chick. They grew quickly and bit aggressively. In the 2010’s anglers enjoyed a largemouth nirvana of sorts on the Chickahomimy with many bass over 10 pounds caught.
Angler catch rates were at record highs in the spring of 2009; double what they were in 2005, and much higher than in most Virginia bass lakes. In 2009, 73% of anglers interviewed rated the largemouth fishery as either good or excellent.
These days the Chickahominy doesn’t produce many fish over six pounds, but there are plenty of one to three pounders according to Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources studies as well as anecdotal angler reports.
Per the fish scientists this fishery is characterized by high angler catches. Of all Virginia tidal rivers, the tidal Chickahominy typically has the highest largemouth catch rates, and it competes with the tidal James River in abundance of bass greater than or equal to 15 inches.
So, you see why MLF chose to visit – plenty of bass for a format that requires anglers to record any “scorable” bass over a pound.
On his first day of the tournament, Wheeler caught and released 33 bass that weighed 78-8!
DWR Biologist Margaret Whitmore is the Tidal River Fisheries Biologist for the agency. She took over the reins of fisheries management for the tidal Chickahominy after longtime DWR Fisheries Biologist Bob Greenlea retired in 2018.
She was in the middle of catfish sampling when we asked for info on the Chickahoniny so we caught up with DWR Chief of Fisheries Mike Bednarski.
He told us that while the Chickahominy has not been stocked with largemouth bass for a while and the fishery gets a lot of pressure, “the population looks pretty good, still.”
“I know in my limited time to fish it’s the river I fish most,” the angler/fisheries manager told W2.
If one refers to the most recent sampling data from 2023 in DWR’s annual Tidal River Fisheries Forecast Report, the tidal Chickahominy still leads all similar rivers in the state, including the James.
Is the river as good as it was 10 years ago? It is not, if you are looking for a trophy. However, the Chick is still fishing well enough to be worth your visit and better than most bass fisheries in Virginia. It’s a beautiful river with a variety of shallow water habitats sure to offer the potential of a bass on every cast.
