Be ready for what Mother Nature has in store during your surf fishing outings in the fall.
Big weather events such as nor’easters and hurricanes produce conditions that are well-known to get bass and blues feeding with abandon. They create white water, turbocharge rips, oxygenate the water, and stir bait to move. Gamefish are oriented to feed when they sense moving water with their lateral line. The increased dynamism of the ocean in big weather events sets off this trigger along with may other elements of stormy weather such as lower light conditions.
Yet, I must admit I get irked when the fishing is slow, and guys say, “It’s too calm.” I agree that sometimes it’s true, but just because stormy weather is good doesn’t mean that calm conditions don’t present opportunities in the surf. Surfcasters, too easily, get caught in binary thinking: if this is good, then that must be bad. I believe that calm conditions, which are the conditions present much of the time, offer far more possibilities than most surfcasters realize.
Environmental Neutrality
If you can’t rely on oceanic and atmospheric conditions to get bass and blues feeding, then you need to figure out where and when they feed the rest of the time. Fish can’t survive by only eating during storms. But what makes storms special, which is an increase in water movement throughout the surf, can be found in more specific places that have current. Current is always a prime place to search for striped bass. If there is structure along with current, then all the better. The best place to fish is, of course, wherever there are baitfish, but current or structure can be enough. Fish will lie behind structure in moving water and wait to ambush bait that is swept along in the current. Even without structure, bass will move with the current feeding opportunistically as they do so.
Spots with current, and hopefully some structure, form the “where” to fish in calm conditions. Putting in considerable time to figure out the windows when striped bass will feed in relation to moon phases, current strengths, and water temperatures constitutes the “when” part. If you’ve found some windows that you know hold the potential to be productive, then all you need and want weather-wise are calm conditions. They will allow you to make a presentation at the right depth, lure speed, and angle of approach.
Big Weather Factor
Big waves and strong wind can completely mess up this kind of bite. Often, you can’t fish a number of productive spots without risk to life and limb. Boulder fields, reefs, jetty tips, and breachways all may be hazardous in rough seas. Certainly, in boulder fields and reefs, it can be impossible to get out to the rocks you want to fish. This is especially true for those in wetsuits who look to access the outer rocks in, or on the edge of, deeper water where bass frequently cruise and stage.
High winds and large waves can also negatively affect presentation. A strong sweep can make it difficult to get many plugs to swim. Large waves push plugs in and wash out others, such as darters and surface metal lips. A strong wind in your face can mean it’s not possible to reach a rip or drop off, while crosswinds can be a very special nightmare. After a tide with big winds, the water can get dirty and weedy.
The compensation is that some spots will turn on and provide potentially great fishing with bucktails, soft plastics, and some plugs. Despite this, many excellent surfcasters prefer calm conditions. They know the spots they are fishing hold good potential and what they want is simply the ability to fish them. This means they want the environment to be neutral. A neutral environment neither increases nor decreases the productivity of their spots but rather offers the opportunity to fish them with optimal presentation. It’s not uncommon for the biggest fish of the season to come up under these conditions.
There’s a spot I fish that has good current and produces some bass up to 40 pounds, but only under the right conditions. Too strong a wind, either in my face or from behind me, ruins the rip and seam that forms there. In another spot any wind in your face means it’s not possible to reach the section of the outflow that holds fish. In both spots, I look for calm winds that allow me to reach productive water with good presentation.
Both these spots do fish better with a light to moderate wind that increases the current. I will consider that when I choose where to fish, but those are still fairly calm conditions, and I don’t need those winds for these spots to hold fish.
Opportunity Events
Calm conditions provide other possibilities for a different type of surfcaster. Not everyone has the time or the inclination to find fish-specific patterns. This surfcaster looks for something more tangible: what I call “opportunity events.” By “opportunity events,” I mean surfcasting situations that are enhanced or generated by the environment that can be visually seen. If you can see fish or bait breaking, there is no need to figure out what is going on silently, hidden beneath the surface of the water. You don’t have to read currents or put in long hours figuring out a spot. You see an opportunity and fish it.
One example of an opportunity event, which is always incredibly easy to spot, is a bunker blitz. The frenzy of jumping bunker is almost impossible to miss. Yet, bunker blitzes are most often calm-condition events. Bunker are filter feeders. When the water becomes dirty or sandy the bunker move elsewhere. It is not uncommon to have schools of bunker near the beach and when the surf kicks up the bunker disappear.
My logs show many days of all-out blitzes on peanut bunker when the winds were light and the surf under three feet. At a couple of south-facing spots near me, light winds out of the west seem to stir bass to blitz bunker. A bit more obvious are strong offshore winds that knock down the surf and create a current moving from shore out towards the ocean. Bunker swim against the current, so strong wind can bring bunker closer to shore into surfcasting range. In New Jersey and up along New England, west winds can trigger a good bunker bite, and the same is true of northerly winds for the South Shore of Long Island. I remember one June, I was on Block Island catching bass into the low 20-pound class, while back home, a few days of strong north winds put bunker and 40 to 50-pound bass on my local beach!
Another example of productive calm conditions are rain bait blitzes. Big water can produce good bites, but there are many, many occasions when fish have been blitzing rainbait in near-flat seas. In calm water, rainbait often schools up. With the water relatively flat, they are easy to spot as reddish-brown stains. I’ve found that if there’s a lot of bait in front of me, rather than moving around until I find feed fish, I’ll just wait for the blitz to start. Most of my best days fishing rainbait have come when the surf is calm.
Lastly, when there is a nor’easter and mullet pull out of the bays, the fishing can be phenomenal. Yet, once the mullet are out on the beach, I’ve found that I’ve often done well in calm conditions. At minimum, calm seas don’t detract from catching bass and blues when mullet are in the wash. They also make it far easier to spot the mullet’s telltale wakes near shore.
Surfcasting requires a particular set of mental skills. The surfcaster needs to know how to find and exploit opportunities under a range of conditions. They need to be able to work through situations that often are less than optimal. When other surfcasters go on about the need for a storm to get thing going, I find myself thinking that they need to stop the whining and make peace with the calm.
