Shadow lines produce fish, day and night.
I’ll never forget the first night I peered down from one of the bridges in Middle Keys in Florida. Two-dozen tarpon ranging from 30 to 150 pounds were staging just inside the shadows thrown by the street lights. They were waiting for mullet to mistakenly enter their deceptive trap. The mullet, seemingly aware of the impending danger, would scurry upstream every time they got within range of the patient tarpon. Nonetheless, every so often a huge tarpon would thrash, roll or jump upon grabbing a careless mullet meal. I can recall standing there in amazement. I was 21 years old and hungry to catch. Of course, I cast netted mullet the next day and set out to capture some tarpon on the night shift. I was successful in getting about 6 to 10 hook ups a night and landing only one to two an evening. That experience was part of my early experience with shadows, shad and sunlight and definitely influenced my analysis of the like on northeastern fish.
Striped bass are amicable to using shadows to their advantage when possible. Like the tarpon down south, stripers will stagger themselves along a bridge’s shadow line waiting for food. Nighttime shadows are often created by bright street lights. The bass wait in the dark for baitfish, crabs or any other forage to come their way. The best fishing occurs when a significant bait presence or migration coincides with the stripers’ presence under the bridge. For example, when the cinder worms hatch in my area, the number of bass hanging in the shadows waiting for the small organisms to enter their realm increases exponentially. The shadows are a learned feeding advantage, as well as a tool of safety for the predator to use. Consider that stripers had to survive being fry, juvenile fish at the early stages of their lives. The instinct to use cover in the form of shadows for food and protection doesn’t exists in their DNA. They don’t abandon these adaptations just because they became too big for the average hawk to handle.
Likewise, dock lights disperse an immense illumination over the water which, in turn, creates nighttime shadows. The lights draw the baby crabs, shrimp and forage fish therefore the striped bass linger in the shadows ready to pounce. At times, one can see the bass just cruising the periphery of the artificial light and other times, they’ll hustle through ambushing prey. Smallish Berkley Hit Sticks, Berkley Gulp, Super Flukes by Zoom, and Jerk Shads by Berkley do the trick.
Furthermore, bass readily use the light and associated shadows behind large vessels to do exactly the same thing. They zip in and out of the shadows to nail the small bait attracted by the light. White, green and blue lights seem to be some of the best for attracting stripers. These groups of fish are usually undeterred by a human presence hovering above. While not exactly sporting for adults to fish these stripers, kids like to fool around while their parents tend to other evening business.
Bridges also create immense daytime shadows that striped bass fervently seek in order to hide and eat. I’ve anchored and sent out adult bunker so it swims just out of the sunlight and inside the shadow line. There, I’ve successfully taken bass from 5 to 25 pounds in the dead of summer when the migration was hundreds of miles from my home waters of New Jersey. These bass are resident fish or those that left the herd on that portion of the trek north. No matter, using the shadows when the sun was bright, the waters were warm and the jet skis were irritating produced some nice stripers.
I’ve taken hundreds of gorgeous, keeper fluke under bridges and in the shadows. I don’t think they always show preference, but every so often it seems like enough summer flounder are caught just out of the sun that it no longer feels like a coincidence. Anglers should certainly pay attention to tendencies. Tautog are perhaps the opposite. They like structure with sunlight more than that without so avoiding shadows might help on select outings.
Not every bridge is the same. Some attract trophy fish most of the year while others simply do not. If a particular bridge has a reputation associated with good catches, then anglers can investigate whether fishing the shadows will lend itself to more fish at the net.
