Until Saturday I had not caught a striper on a fly in 2016. I had caught a few with hardware, even one on a plug, but they just hadn’t turned on for the fly for me.
Now, I’ve reestablished the striper connection and it felt fantastic.
The water is a bit murky, so this is blind casting. There are no boils, no bait to follow, no birds crashing bait balls. This is just walking out there with a plan and a bit of faith and flinging a fly out there to see what happens.
It would be just as easy to do this without a fly on and you could have the same results if the fish aren’t in, which is to say nothing.
Saturday though… Saturday it worked. Casting out the clear int. sink with a lead eye synthetic clouser and just stripping it in when there was a big pull and a schoolie striper came to hand. That is just fun.
A little schoolie striper..
It reminds me of fishing for steelhead half-pounders. There certainly are bigger fish out there, but a half-pounder pulls hard and there are more of them around than the big fish. That’s how this striper fishing is too. The fish aren’t huge, but the are fun and the pull harder than their size would dictate.
I fished for about 2.5 hours and managed just over a dozen schoolie stripers. This is about a 5 minute drive from my house.
Feeling very fortunate.
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Excellent….Glad to see your time was well spent. There are larger ones (a lot larger) out there, just not as many as there once were, of course. Don’t forget you also have dinner plate sized flounder around too.
I saw your post on fishing for bones on the island of Maui. I’m off to Hawaii in a couple weeks to chase those HUGE b@$t@r%$ again myself. Just at a different location than your trip. There’s no question that stalking super spooky double digit bones in water less than knee deep has made me a much better fly fisherman. I’ve heard of your guide “Jo Jo” and have seen his videos…you’ll be doing a lot of blind casting there just as if you were in SF Bay. Good luck, and as you know, there’s nowhere like Hawaii
Yeah, I’m prepared to blind cast for bones. I know there are purists who won’t like that, but I’m becoming less and less pure by the day because I enjoy fishing and I find purity diminishes the joy.