Holdovers

It's mid December now. The last migratory stripers have left New England waters and we are left with holdovers. These are schooling fish, overwhelmingly males, that chose to stick around in warmer rivers and mud bottomed Cape Cod tidal creeks and salt ponds. Some of CT's holdover bass make their way into tidal creeks too. It's fun winter fishing, but more and more over exploited every year. Finding a piece of water for yourself isn't always easy on warm sunny days. When you do get some water to yourself and the fish are there, it can be immense fun. During my latest holdover hunt Rick and I fished one hole with only a fish each, then found fish in a river bend further up. My first cast in that bend with my three fly rig resulted in three stripers landed.

That was never repeated, though I did have three fish on a number of times. Doubles were frequent. But with fish that are too big to move much with a short strong strip, in is hard to set the hook on the second and third takers. In one point I observed six different fish hooked at different times in one retrieve. Six different fish on in one cast and I landed two. More than anything, this shows how hungry these guys are. They aren't skinny, they're fat and well fed for sure, but they know it is only going to get colder. It isn't particularly necessary to fish more than one fly but I feel it increases competition and makes them more aggressive.

After the bite died at the bend we moved again and found more willing fish. After catching a bunch I decided to change things up and fish for them with my 5wt fiberglass rod, 7x tippet, and shad flies. Catching striped bass on that light tippet was a new challenge, mostly because they have fairly hard mouths and a strip set does not treat 2lb kindly. I worked around that by using fairly fine wire barbless hooks. The hook-set was just a gentle lifting of the rod. The fights weren't anything special. If you know how to work a fish correctly on light tippet you don't have to fight them to death. Besides, these guys were small enough to dead lift with that 7x.

There's likely to be an awful lot of these little dudes getting caught within the next few months. They don't really provide much variety, so I'm going to do what I can to keep posts interesting. I won't be fishing three fly rigs and 7x for them every time, but I might try to pull some through the ice. That should be fun.