Northern snakehead run draws curious anglers to Potomac

[emad]

By JOSHUA PARTLOW
The Washington Post

MOUNT VERNON, Va. -- The water was alive. Snakeheads, hundreds of them, were slithering among the minnows, rising up through the concrete blocks that dam Dogue Creek like salmon leaping for freedom.

Sunday was, in the Potomac River's increasingly bizarre snakehead history, a landmark day. And it was something Mark Hammond, in three decades of fishing the Potomac tributary near Fort Belvoir, never dreamed he would see.

"They're in there by the thousands. You could see them literally coming up along the banks. The ones we caught didn't even put a dent in them," said Hammond, 43, an avid bass fisherman from Florida living here temporarily. "We would throw one in the cooler, two others would jump out and we'd have to chase them through the woods."

Since last year's discovery that the voracious, nonnative northern snakehead had infiltrated the Potomac River and its tributaries, fishermen have pulled them up in ones and twos, each catch a major event that further solidified the proof of an entrenched and breeding population.