Big Bass Hunting

Big striped bass are a fish that have gotten under my skin. They're a permanent part of my soul. Little makes me as excited as the pursuit of large stripers on fly tackle. I see it as my ultimate challenge. I want to catch the striped bass nobody else is catching on the fly. Real cows. Fish that are a stretch to fool on any artificial, not just a fly. 

Obviously I'm far from the only one captivated by big bass. My good friend Mark Phillipe is too,  so much so that he,  like I do, even considers fishing for them with conventional tackle. One method that we are trying to perfect uses conventional gear to catch big striped bass on the fly rod. Sound confusing? It may be if you haven't read any of my few previous posts on this method. 

The other day Mark and I went out to hunt big Bass in his boat. First we hoped cans looking for exotics. It was all banded rudderfish so it didn't take long for us to quit that and pursue big bass. 

The method we were using is teasing. One angler casts a large hookless plug, the other waits for a fish to boil up on it and get withing range so that a fly that roughly matches the size and color of the plug can be cast at the angry bass. As soon as the fly enters the water,  the plug worker rips the teaser out of the way so that there is only one thing left for the upset fish to take out its annoyance on.

Shortly after we got to our spot, a place that has proven it's big bass productivity last year, I had a fish boil up on the spook. A couple casts later,  as the plug neared the boat,  I saw a monsterous bass shadowing it just two feet behind. It was a heart stopped. It took me a few moments to regain sanity and recast the spook. Hand over heart that striper was every bit of 50 pounds. Neither Mark nor I were even fully rigged and ready yet,  there was no chance to feed it a fly. And of course we didn't get another good shot for a while. But we made it work.

I wasn't paying much attention to the spook at the time since we hadn't see fish in an hour. I looked down at the deck for a moment and when I looked up I saw what I thought was my spook, swishing side to side at the surface of the water. But it wasn't where it should be. At that moment a fish blew up on the actual spook, which was 15 feet to the right and just beyond this other thing. I quickly saw that there were two others. These were big Bass,  calmly drifting just under the surface! One had peeled off and. Was hot on the plug. Mark made a perfect cast and I advance the spook a couple feet towards the fly before pulling it out of the game. The fish turned of the fly and inhaled it. Then it was off to the races! This was no monster,  but it was a very nice bass of a size class we haven't seen much of around here.

Teasing had done it's job on a quite slow bite. One fish proved that we could do this here. Our previous attempt together had been a chaotic failure. Armed with better gear we will try again soon, hopefully.