The northern snakehead was not invited to the Potomac. It turned up in a pond in Crofton, the state poisoned the pond, and a few years later the fish appeared in the tidal creeks off the river anyway, breathing air and looking like something drawn from a written description rather than from life. For a while the official position was alarm. The position on the water now is that they fight hard, they eat well, and there is no limit. The river made its peace the way rivers do, which is to say it did not ask anybody.
You fish them in the pads. Mattawoman, Chicamuxen, Aquia, any of the shallow creeks where hydrilla and lily pads fill in over the summer until the surface looks like somebody’s lawn. You throw a hollow body frog up into the salad and walk it back across the top, and the whole time you are watching for a wake that moves in a straight line toward your bait with obvious intent. A bass pushes water. A snakehead comes at a frog like it has been waiting all week to settle something.
The strike is the problem. It is less a bite than a detonation, a hole in the pads where your frog used to be and a spray of water three feet high, and every instinct you own says set the hook right now. Do that and you pull a wet frog out of an empty mouth. The rule everybody repeats and nobody follows is to wait, count to two, feel the weight, then lean into it and keep leaning, because you are dragging a fish and forty pounds of vegetation to the boat at the same time. Heavy braid is not optional. Neither is a good pair of pliers, because a snakehead has a mouth that appears to have been borrowed from a different animal entirely.
We fished a morning in early September with a retired shop teacher out of Waldorf who has caught more of them than anybody I know and still will not say the name. He calls them the fish. As in, the fish are up in that back corner, or, you missed the fish. He hooked four before nine o’clock, landed three, and put them all in the cooler with the sober efficiency of a man performing a public service. He also fed us lunch, and it was excellent, and none of us thought to ask what it was until afterward.
By ten the sun was up over the trees, the frog bite quit, and we sat in the shade of the bank arguing about whether an invasive species can be a gamefish. Nobody moved anybody. The fish declined to weigh in, which is more or less how it got this far.
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