Last night I went striper fishing. There were a lot of fish around. The area was very shallow and protected. There were about six or seven guys fishing. I caught seventeen stripers. I only saw one other fish caught.
The one other fish landed was caught by a guy that got there well after dark. He asked me what I was using. He tried the same thing. He hooked up fairly quickly. I had to leave shortly after. However, I have little doubt that he caught a few more fish after I left.
So that leaves the other five or six guys, they combined caught nothing. They had just as many fish around them as me. How did they catch nothing? Answer; stupidity.
Let me explain the scenario. The guys were fishing a small beach maybe thirty yards long. On the left was a jetty. To the right was a sea wall that stuck out into the ocean fifty yards before breaking to the right. To make this area even more protected are mooring a hundred yards off shore with fairly large boats to block the wind. Past these moorings is the outside of the cove. So this beach is basically a cove within a cove. Conditions were flat calm. The water couldn't be flatter if it were in a bird bath.
I was fishing on the sea wall. I was only there because the beach was crowded. Fish were popping up everywhere. In front of me, in front of the beach, hell, out of casting distance near the boats. It was not a blitz, but there were many fish actively feeding everywhere.
On the sea wall, I caught ten fish before dark (this means the other fisherman could see me, hence forth, they could see what I was using to catch them.) I was using my seven foot rod. I was catching all the fish on small zoom flukes and a few on a bucktail jig. The bait was small so I "matched the hatch"
Okay, now picture five guys spread out twenty feet apart on a beach. A beach that has walls on both sides. There are fish within casting distance and the small bait is trapped. Remember the water is flat. There is little wind. All is quiet.
UNTIL these five guys throw out huge poppers. They cast there giant poppers fifty yards. They make a splash that goes three feet high, Ka-Boom! Then they work the poppers the way you would in rough water. SPLASH---SPLASH---SPLASH. When all five poppers were in the water at the same time, it looked like the U.S transport ships invading Normandy.
So needless to say these guys caught absolutely nothing. There were so many fish, it should have been easy for them to rack up ten fish a piece. They weren't huge fish. Some were very small schoolies but there were certainly small keepers mixed in. After a few minutes of these idiots scaring the bejesus out of the fish, the feeding stopped off the beach. I continued to catch fish. When the armada left, the fish returned to the shallows. I went over and caught a few, some in as shallow as two feet of water.
I am no expert on striper fishing. I don't claim to be. As a matter of fact, the more I do it this year, the more I realize I have so many places I want to learn. I do feel I have common sense. Last week, I had a couple good nights fishing bigger lures for fish the same size. The difference? I was fishing the ocean front. The two foot waves were slamming the pebble beach and boulders. I used lures to get the fishes attention. I used poppers, Jumping Minnows and a Wooden egg that certainly makes a loud splash. Yet the fish crushed these lures. The sound of the ocean masked the noise my lures made.
You can't get away with that in calm conditions. If I'd have casted my wooden float last night with a small lure on the business end, I would have scared all the fish within a thirty feet radius of the landing. One of the most common mistakes I see surfcasting is guys using huge lures when the fish are on small bait. It seems obvious to me to downsize, but I see it all the time.
For the record, the other guy that I'm pretty sure caught more than one fish was using his seven foot rod. He was casting small stuff like the Zoom Fluke and Tsunami sand eel. You know where his big heavy surf rod was? In his car, just like mine. Smart.
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