Local guide Eddie Griggs starts his season in earnest in mid-March with a lipless crankbait and a spinnerbait on the spawning flats. As the spawn progresses, he gets out his flipping stick. Then, during his preferred summer season, he favors a Bagley's Killer B1 crankbait in gold/black back and a junebug Zoom finesse worm affixed to a 1/8-ounce slider head for much of his fishing. In the upriver pads, he'll often turn to a topwater or a hollow-bodied frog in the summer but he notes that this strategy "can produce 25 bites one day and two the next."
While he often focuses on visible cover, he says the best way to catch a big fish in the summer is by dragging a jig-and-pig through brushpiles on deep water drops.
He says the tides are critical on the Chickahominy. "The best is the last two hours of outgoing and the first two hours of incoming. On the Potomac you can still catch plenty on high incoming. Here, you can catch some, but you need to run the tides.OCAL
