Anglers, keep your eyes open: Fish secrets can be revealed in unexpected places

One day this week I was pulling up the anchor about 6 miles offshore and couldn’t help but come the conclusion that either I was getting weaker or my anchor was getting heavier.

It had broken free from the bottom. But wow! Was it ever a bear to pull it 70 feet up to the boat. It didn’t take me but a few good heaves to realize that, thankfully, it wasn’t me getting weaker, I really did have some, in fact a lot of extra weight, at the end of my rope.

So I heaved and grunted until the chain finally broke the surface and the anchor appeared in a dirty cloud 10 feet below. But before I even saw the anchor I had already figured out where the extra weight had come from.

Seeing the dirty cloud only confirmed my conclusion. It was thick, gray mud with the consistency of sticky clay, and it was caked all over my anchor. Talk about a mess!

The mud wasn’t the type you just slosh your anchor about at the surface of the water to remove. It was so thick and sticky that I had to dig in deep with my fingers to scrape and pry it from the anchor flukes and shank.

Ok, so much for the woe-is-me story about pulling a heavy anchor. The really cool part of my little incident revealed itself as I was clawing through the mud.

Worms! Numerous worms and worm-hole tubes had infiltrated the gloppy mud long before my anchor ever pried the sample free from the ocean’s floor. And now they were wiggling and squiggling in the muddy mire on the bow of my boat.

OK, if you’re trying to enjoy your breakfast right now as you read the paper — maybe that image doesn’t seem so appealing. But to a fisherman such a (messy) discovery can provide a wealth of information.

Why are the fish here? What are they feeding on? What is their environment like? How do they capture their prey? So many questions anglers typically want to know when they’re trying to become better fishermen.

As the old saying goes, “Know your quarry and you’ll be a better hunter.” The way I figure, the same holds for fishing — know your fish …

More:Delmarva teal hunting outlook is much better if you have private land

The seatrout, croaker, bluefish, skates and sand sharks we had been catching all morning were obviously there to partake in the of worm buffet served up over a bed of creamy mud. Ahhh delicious! Of course knowing about the worms only brings up more questions.

Are they always there? How do the fish catch them? How many types of worms live there? What other fish feed on the worms? What do the worms eat? Can we get these worms to use for bait?

Quite frankly, I don’t know the answer to any of those questions, but I have known for a long time that late-summer and fall-fishing for trout and croaker has always been best over muddy bottom areas. Now I’ve seen the evidence why.

The anchor incident was an example of how Mother Nature sometimes lets her little secrets out in very unexpected fashion. I remember other lessons of feeding behavior, like when I found tiny seahorses in the stomachs of yellowfin tuna, small dolphin in the stomachs of big dolphin, stingray barbs stuck in the jaws of sharks, little crabs inside sea bass, and sand dollars inside bluefish.

There's no doubt that the ocean’s food chain has a very complex set of links!

So the next time you pull your anchor and it comes up with clumps of seaweed, sand, or sticky mud, don’t be so quick to cast it off along with a few choice words. Look closely at the little chunk of habitat that’s made such a mess at the bow of your boat; you might just end up being a better fisherman for the inconvenience.

More:Mosquito forecast for fall hunting on Delmarva: Frightening