On the Hunt for Striped Bass and Bunker

Right now the name of the striper game in LIS is bunker. If you want to find stripers right now you need to find bunker. Luckily and perhaps unluckily there was a lot of bunker in the first area I fished on Saturday. The main issue with there being a lot of bunker around, and especially adults, is that the fish there will not be easy to catch even if you were to use a live bunker. There were just so many big adult menhaden there that the few big keeper sized bass were not in a feeding frenzy simply because they didn't need to be. They could just come up, eat one big adult, and then wait until they got hungry again and do it again. So that's what I saw there, every now and then a big bass would come up and take a bunker and then it would go back down. The whole time it happened only four times. Four times in two hours doesn't make for good odds. I had my shots though, but they were with schoolies in the docks. There were lots of juvenile bunker there and though I had two fish pop for a gurgler I couldn't help but think they had filled up during the night and that I had missed my shot by getting up right around sunrise. I din't get skunked anyway, caught a few snapper blues and snagged some bunker which were donated to the snaggers that were collecting bait to chunk later in the day for some big fish at the mouth of the river.

Sunday I was in a great spot at the right tide with good conditions. The day before there had been mayhem in this spot. Bunker were getting destroyed by bluefish, and though none were seen there were probably some stripers underneath. As is always the case with stripers I had shit for luck and the water was dead. At least I got to hang out and fish in a cool spot in the Thimble Islands.