Bait and Switch

Mark Alpert and I rolled the dice yesterday and went to some completely new water to look for some stripers, preferably of the large and hungry variety. It was cold, cloudy, and breezy, but we were going to do what we had to do to find the bite.

As it turned out, a three mile run to a lonely rock in the middle of the sound was all it took, we were into schoolie bass within the first casts we took. And, a bit surprisingly, there were still albies around!

I get a lot of satisfaction out of finding stripers when they are not showing themselves. Throughout most of the day, we only found stripers by working the water over, not by looking for blitzes or birds working. I feel that angler who rely on these things miss some of the better opportunities and a lot of the bigger bass. After we worked the rocky drop off on the south end of our little island and chased albies for a bit, Mark and I moved to the North Side to see if we could find bigger fish. What we found there was a beautiful rip that had not been visible when we had approached it earlier in the morning. It was perfect big bass water, and some casts with a hookless spook into the edge of the rip showed that there were lots of fish there. That spook got slammed time and time again. It was time for some bait and switch.

The idea of bait and switch is fairly simple. One angler casts the spook, draws the fish up to the surface, and pulls them into fly casting range. Then the fly caster drops a big Hollow Fleye, Beast Fly, or Popper right on the spook and the one working the spook rips it out of there. The bass are then left trying to find something to smash, and there's the fly, looking enticing and delicious. If all goes well, the fly caster hooks the fish. It takes skill, teamwork, and brains. It doesn't always work out perfectly, and if you are easily dissuaded by missed opportunities and missed fish, or don't like fishing something with no hooks for large parts of the day, this is not for you. Mark and I are on the same wavelength with this stuff, we just love seeing big fish, so we were both having a blast regardless of which rods we were using. You have to be on the same wavelength to get this right too it is properly difficult. But when it pays off it feels awesome, and we managed to get it just right a few times on this trip.

We had a healthy number of chances at big fish. I hooked probably a 20lb bass that came off 30 seconds into the fight, probably because I did set the hook enough times (one is not enough with big hooks and big bass) and I had a 40-45 inch fish hit the fly boatside that I didn't get tight to. Mark had his fair share of frustrations too. But the handful of times where it worked out exactly as hoped made up for those frustrations. 

Between tides we explored a bit. What we found: lots of seals! 

That's pretty much that. A bunch of bass on the first day of November. It seems, though late, that the fall run is at its peak right now.