Fishing Report: Quality AND quantity

I had repeat customers Larry and his son Drew on board for a striper trip today. The day couldn’t have been better. The weather man was wrong in our favor for once. We had sunny skies and light winds all morning. The day started off on the right foot as we had 4 keeper scup in the boat on first 2 drops. Just like Monday, we went with a light load of bait to take advantage of the remaining ebb tide.

The tide was moving in a funky direction on the first drift, so we adjusted on the second and found the fish right away. Larry put the first fish in the boat, the biggest of the day. This has happened the last 3 times out where the biggest is the first to the boat…

We were marking quite a few fish in a tight area, so we adjusted the drift again to stay on them. Drew had the hot hand. I’m not sure what it was, but the stripers really liked him this morning. We put 3 more quick ones in the boat and lost a couple of others. By then, the tide was really slowing down and other boats began to show up so we elected to reload on bait and wait for the switch.

Reloading in scup took a lot longer than we expected. The tide had already turned where we were and the action was much slower than our first stop, the scup were also much smaller. It took close to 45 minutes to get what we felt would be enough for the last 2 hours of the trip. We headed back to the scene of the crime from earlier in the morning but there were a few boats in my drift lane. I decided to head in shallow and check, the tide was really quick there and kelp was a problem. Every time we dropped, we were getting wrapped up.

Yesterday, I had found a pile of fish a few miles away in much deeper water. Nothing had changed as far as weather conditions overnight so I figured they should still be there. We made the 5 mile run and dropped down. On the next 3 drifts the guys had doubles. These were slightly smaller fish but they were incredibly aggressive. We weeded through the smaller bass and eventually picked off a few that were over 40"...

At the rate we were catching, it didn’t take long to burn through the bait. We ended up packing it in a few minutes early to get a head start on cleaning fish and scrubbing the boat. In all we boated 15 bass, 9 of them were over 40". Larry is back again on Thursday, my fingers are crossed for a repeat…