"Weeding Out" Big Striped Bass

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

This question was posed by Pat in a comment yesterday: how do you weed through small striped bass to get the big girls? (not verbatim). I see this question come up fairly often, and I've also seen a lot of different answers. And I can say that no simple answer I've seen is right. I've only been fishing for striped bass really consistently since 2016, but in that time I've been through a trial by fire. I learn almost everything by doing, and there's been an awful lot of doing for me since I caught my first striper on the fly. What I haven't learned by doing I've learned from people that have had a lot more time to learn themselves than I have. My methodology comes from a broad range of striped bass angling ideologies. I can look at everyone I've fished for stripers with since I've started and see what I've learned from them and how I've incorporated it in my own fishing. So don't take this as some yahoo newbie thinking he's all that and knows what's what. I've only got one 40" bass on the fly under my belt, I'm not a big bass authority be any stretch. But I am big bass focused and big bass obsessed, and I know people that put up larger fish consistently. So I don't think this is something I can't shed some light on, though my answers may not be what you want.

I personally believe that in most scenarios where there are large numbers of small schooling bass, there aren't many truly large stripers to weed through the small fish for. Big stripers and small stripers act differently and like different things. Just because there's a thousand stripers in a spot doesn't mean there's enough 35-50" bass for it to be possible to catch one that size. My first answer to the question "how do I weed out a big striper" is simple: don't. Go when and where there aren't small fish, but are big fish. The divide could well be very short, like the distance from one bar to the next one out from the beach, or the 35 second it takes for a group of schoolies to quit blitzing and move on and the big clean up crew cows step up to the plate.

The distance between this fish...

...and this fish....

...was the distance between the beach lip and the bar. I couldn't reach the bar that day, and couldn't have with any manor of fly tackle. But Alec could with a long, stiff surf casting rod and a hefty wooden topwater plug, and he caught a good number of really big bass that day. I probably could have too, and I had a few takes from monster bass, but I spent far too much time chasing the breaking schoolies while the big fish were lurking outside of the blitz. My biggest of the day came when I lagged behind the blitz and hooked one of the cleanup crew.

Looking for the cleanup crew is a great way to get on a bigger bass when you've been on a bunch of smalls. You can try to sink a fly through the blitzing fish, and that can work. Big fish are often just under the schoolies, picking off dead and dying bait fish fluttering down to them, but I've honestly had better luck just sticking around in a spot after the blitz has died or moved on. 

Last year, early in the fall, Mark Alpert and I were on a really good morning blitz in the fog, and the busting fish had moved well down the beach to our North when I hooked up with a big bass right where they had been a minute ago. Not many days after that, on the boat with Mike Roy, I hooked into another really nice fish in virtually the same exact circumstances. Then again not long later, on the boat with Mark again, I hooked a big bass and lost it in the rocks where the blitz had just been.

Photo courtesy Mike Roy

My absolute best fly for pulling bigger stripped bass out from below or behind a blitz, or just off rocky structure with no breaking fish at all, is a big white Game Changer. Big fish are lazy. They are looking for something injured or even dead, something they don't need to work to catch, and the Game Changer, fished with an erratic retrieve and long pauses, acts just like a bait fish that a schoolie or snapper blue didn't quite finish the job on.

In the rare scenarios where you actually may have to weed through small fish in the same place as big fish, and I personally have never seen such a thing, you have very limited options. You can up-size flies progressively. Then you can try fishing deeper in the water column. Then you can fish the fly at a very slow pace.  But even an 18" bass will try to eat a 12" fly fished deep and slow a lot of the time. And you are out of luck if the fish are selectively feeding on small bait. If there are tons of 20" bass in the way, you are going to catch those fish first. If you can't just get to the bigger fish by fishing deeper, bigger and slower, we are still left with my first answer to the big question. Don't try to weed through the small fish. It seems crazy to some to leave a fish every cast bite to go look for one taker, but I do it often. I'll stand in one spot for three hours making the same cast and mind numbingly slow swing or retrieve over and over and over looking for one or two big eats. And that's just not something many fly casters will put up with. But most fly casters will never catch a 30lb striper on the fly either. So it's up to you... do you want to run with the crowd and catch the fish that everyone can catch, or do you want to catch big striped bass?

If it's the latter, go where and when there aren't as many schoolies instead of trying to weed through them.