Yesterday I took a long lunch to test a plug I’ve been working on. My “testing tank” is the mouth of a tidal estuary that’s barely more than 5 minutes from my house. It’s not a high-yield fishing spot, but there’s deep, clean water and with areas of current and no current, it’s a great place to get a full range behaviors within a short time.
Firstly, I did not like what I was seeing; the bait only swam well when cranked at a high rate of speed or when pulled against the dumping tide. But I’m stubborn and I have a tendency to try to force myself into understanding things that don’t have a Googleable answer. So, cast after cast, I watched this plug do the same wrong thing, over and over, while I tried so hard to come up with a logic-based fix; so much so that I was starting to get a stress headache!
Every few casts, I’d pitch one out into the current, just to see it swimming how I wanted it to swim, even though it was doing so in a condition where I wouldn’t typically fish it. On one of those casts, the bait swung under the bridge and as I sped it out from behind the abutment, what I would estimate to be a 36-inch striper, rushed out of the shadow and tried to eat it! On the two casts that followed, I tried to swim the same path, and got the same result; that same fish rushed the plug, but ultimately stopped short of committing to the full take.
It’s a sensible place for a striped bass to feed. All of the water coming out of that estuary is funneled down to a span of maybe 50 feet, that funneling has dug out a deep hole over time and that leading edge of the abutment, creates almost a vacuum effect, where helpless baitfish are delivered in a perpetual riffle the stripers waiting along the wall. It’s textbook stuff, but I love stuff like that, because you can see it, understand it and then apply it to other spots.
That night I went out to fish the surf, the marine forecast was calling for 1- to 2-foot seas, so I went to a favorite calm to moderate surf spot and found a heavy groundswell battering the shoreline to the point that that it rendered the rock I wanted to stand on completely out of the question. After trying a few peripheral plays to try and salvage the commitment to getting into the spot, I found that it was also hopelessly weeded up and was forced to abort.
It was midnight and I really didn’t have time to run another play and hike the spot where I knew I could fish in those conditions. So I called it and headed home. Then I started doing the math on the timing of the tide and it lead me to the idea that maybe I could pull a skunk-saver off that abutment!
I arrived and slid my feet back into my soaked and sandy wetsuit socks, laced up my boots and snuck over to the bridge. As I made my way out along the rip-rap, I heard a strange sound. It kind of sounded like a low hiss and then a clumsy splash. In the darkness I couldn’t really see much, but I could tell there was something in the water in front of me. I switched on my headlamp and saw a black silhouette with a white face and dark eyes peering back at me. At first I thought it was a geriatric cormorant, complete with gray feathers on its face, but closer inspection revealed that it was a possum!
Connecting the dots on what was going on, the possum was essentially running the same play that the striper had been running twelve hours earlier. He was set up on the lowest rock, utilizing his superior night vision to spot baitfish exiting the estuary and picking them off right as that ‘vacuum riffle’ guided them in close enough to grab. I had interrupted his plan and accidentally cornered him on the end of the rip rap. All I could think was, “at least it wasn’t a skunk!”
I was able to exterminate my own skunk as well, with a high 20-inch class striper that took an NLBN K-Tail swum along the edge of the rushing water. But what I really came away with is the notion that paying attention to the spots where land predators are taking advantage of a waterborne prey source, just might lead me to some new spots of my own.
Plus, I got to see a possum swimming, I bet most people haven’t see that!
