Terrific striper fishing

This past week the striper fishing has been truly great. I could go on with many stories about fish caught by myself or my friends this week. My last three outings have been 7,9, 12. Jeff and Dave have both been nailing fish.

To spare you all the details, I'll just talk about tonight. Jeff and I went to his favorite place to fish tonight. Its a place he talks about often and catches a lot of fish at. Its a spot where schoolies can be caught one night and the next a big fish might be caught. Blues show up here also later in the spring. We started about 6 pm. The sun was in our face and the breeze and temperature were very comfortable. After fishing about five minutes I walked back to the car to get my sunglasses. In the time I was gone, Jeff caught two fish. Both schoolies, both a lot of fun. We both noticed the stripers were spunky tonight, probably due to the warming water temps.

Surprisingly, we ran into some bait and tried to follow it up the shoreline. Although the bait was in close, most of the stripers were at the end of the cast. Between Jeff and myself, we landed 23 fish. My friend Dave and his brother were in a boat just offshore, I don't know how many they caught but it was a lot. They got a couple keepers. They got close enough on their drift a couple times to yell to each other.

Bad angle but this fish was 33 inches

Right about dark, I hooked into my last fish. I could tell immediately it was not a small one ( the previous fish was my smallest of the night; about 10 inches. After a 3 minute battle that involved a lot of line screaming off the reel, I landed my first keeper of the year ( not including holdovers in January). It was 33 inches. After a few pictures we let it go. That was a hell of a way to end the night.


Post script- I seriously doubt I will catch as many trout as I did last year. I'm going to ride this striper train as long as I can.