Way South Fishing Reports

Way South Chesapeake Bay Fishing Report, June 5 Update:

Sheepshead fishing is moving into prime form and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is a hotspot in the southern Bay. Several boats, jet skis, and kayak anglers have been pulling fish from the pilings. One jet ski angler reported that he had a slower, but steady day targeting sheepshead in between the second and third islands. They caught seven sheepshead and some nice sized tautog using frozen fiddler crabs for bait. Another kayak angler found a limit of sheepshead plus a few extras, fishing the CBBT pilings closer to the Virginia side using live fiddlers on bottom sweeper jigs. The other Virginia Beach bridges also hold sheepshead along with tautog, black drum, and red drum. Spadefish are also moving to inshore structures, and some have been found around the CBBT. The Chesapeake Light Tower is another popular offshore destination to find spadefish during the warmer months.

Bull red drum can still be found on shallow flats, but some schools are starting to transition to deeper structure. Boats are catching them around the islands of the CBBT. Sidescan is usually required to locate them and a good tactic is to search around the rocky islands until you see a school on the fish finder. Once located, dropping down large paddletails or straight tails on two-ounce jigheads is a great presentation to get them to bite. Cobia are now showing up in better numbers at the mouth of the bay and their numbers should continue to increase throughout the month of June. Boats with towers have been searching the oceanfront and the shoals just inside the mouth of the Bay. The bite has not been red hot, but boats covering a lot of water are finding fish on the surface that are usually willing to eat. The season will open for cobia on June 15th. Once it does, live eels will be an excellent choice to get fish to eat. Artificial lures such as bucktails, topwater lures, and shallow diving twitchbaits are also popular options.