Last week, I made a striper trip in my kayak off Newport, RI. It was an early Monday morning, and if my results were even close to what I’d seen on Friday, it stood to be a great day. Pedaling out in full darkness, watching the GPS on my Humminbird Helix 9 to avoid the large reefs that lurk just beneath the surface, I was excited to get a line in the water. But over the next 45 minutes, the screen was barren and all blind cast attempts into beautiful reef structure, turned up zeros. My close friend and kayak compadre, Mario Santos and I split up, to see if we could find any fish. A few small pods of bass remained on a few tight drop-offs, but the bite was proving to be tough and the acres of stripers we’d found three days earlier, were gone.
When the sun finally started to clear the horizon, a sizeable pod of 20-pound class stripers surfaced in the form of a large, dark, elliptical stain on the mirror surface. I flicked a BigWater Silent Partner (soft plastic eel) into the dark patch and fished it fast through the school, a 20-pounder ate it, which I landed after a few tenuous moments when I drifted a little too close to a breaking reef! After another 90 minutes of fishing I had two more stripers of about the same size, but there was no rhythm to the bite, and it was turning out to be the quintessential ‘slow pick’. The tube and worm guys were hooking up more than everyone else, but I don’t really enjoy trolling so I stuck with other methods and enjoyed a reheated slice of humble pie.
I decided that I would head in early and grab breakfast before logging on at 9 a.m. to start work. On my way back to the launch, I spent a little time drifting in the wind, watching the fish finder and observing how the baitfish related to the structure and current. Looking over the side of the yak, in 25 feet of water, I could clearly see the bottom; sandy patches, big rocks, and vast fields of dark bottom (weeds). I became obsessed with how the wind was strong enough to push me against the current, and that it allowed me to see the clouds of mid-sized bait holding on the down-current edges of large rocks on the screen. Some boulders and ledges didn’t hold fish, while others held piles. A pattern I noticed by cross-referencing – looking at the screen and then over the side – was that a boulder on the transition from sand to dark bottom was guaranteed to hold a pile of bait.
Before long I found myself reaching back for my light spinning setup and sending a 3-inch NLBN paddletail down there to do some investigating. Suddenly I was hooking up almost every drop with sea bass that ranged from 7 to 14 inches, no keepers, but it brought me back to the year I moved to the ocean shore, 22 years old and not enough to sense to have a care in the world. At that time, I was just thrilled to catch something as I tried my best to learn on my own. And with so much learning taking place on my kayak that day, I became transfixed by the fact that I could look over the side and know whether I would hook up, without confirming the presence of fish on my screen. As the sandy patches grew larger, I landed a few fluke, up to maybe 15 inches. But all this life made it really obvious why striped bass spend so much time in these waters. Mario capped off the morning with a 21-inch fluke and I had to skip breakfast on my way back so I could get to work.
My eyes saw through the screen for a solid hour, as I pictured the events of the morning and tried my best to commit the takeaways to memory and covert them to striper logic. Finally, my brain returned to my body and my eyes focused back on the lines of text running across my screen. But nothing gets me more excited, even at 45 years old, than feeling like I gained a new edge on fishing. And the fun I had catching those undersized sea bass and fluke, proved that fishing is all about the hit.
