Bonito and a BIG Black Sea Bass on the Fly

A couple weekends ago I wanted to show my friend Brandon some good bonito fishing either in CT or Rhode Island. We ended up going about as far east as I was willing, because that's where the party was. Under cloudy skies and with a east-northeast wind blowing, we launched and set out into waters where, unbeknownst to either of us, a great white had been seen just days before. Actually, Ian Devlin and I had been there while that tagged shark was there. I would have loved to have seen it then, but I'm pleased it didn't show up with Brandon and I out there in our kayaks. 

Initially, we waited around in close for fish to show. There wasn't much sign of life though, and there was a cluster of boats about a mile out, so we meandered over to check it out. Again we saw no breaks and not much bait, so we both turned to fishing deep.  That bite was going strong, with porgies and smaller black sea bass being the major players. I kept hoping a grey triggerfish or some kind of snapper would come up.

Stenotomus chrysops

Towards the end of one drift I felt a very subtle take and set into what felt like another tiny sea bass. I began reeling up the fish when suddenly, ten cranks in, it woke up and revealed that it wasn't tiny at all. My five weight doubled over as the fish ran back down towards the bottom, taking 30 feet of line. It dogged be for a little while, making me wonder just what I'd hooked into. Then I got it topside, and it was the biggest black sea bass I'd ever seen in person. An elephant had, once again, found my peanut.

Centropristis striata (photo courtesy Brandon Hakulin)

(photo courtesy Brandon Hakulin) 

Not long after I released that monster the fog bank I'd been watching to the east started closing the gap and I made the executive decision to go back in. I don't mess around with fog in kayaks a mile from shore. We made it into the inlet before the fog rolled by and right around the time some bonito showed up. Our timing could not have been more perfect.

I hooked up in after a bit of chasing the school around. They had thinned out a bit and weren't breaking, but I could see flashes deeper in the water column. In all likelihood these fish were working cleanup, taking stunned or dead silversides, missed casualties of the initial blitz. Eventually one of those flashes was on my fly.

Sarda sarda

We chased the bonito up and down the channel for a bit before Brandon decided he was better off on the rocks. He landed and walked out the Jetty, I stayed in my kayak. I was in perfect position to photograph and fish the next school that erupted in the eddy. 

As that blitz dissipated I hooked up again. It was the same scenario as the first, after the bait spread out and the surface breaks ceased cleanup crew took the leftovers. 

That action continued for a solid hour after that. I missed three more takes on the fall (a big albie taking a fly on the fall almost always hooks itself, but these little bonito... not so much) and didn't catch another, but I'd doubled my total lifetime bonito count so I was happy. Unfortunately for Brandon, beginners luck didn't kick in. He had one swipe and no hookups. I think it's likely that my full sinking line helped substantially, as well as my relatively slow retrieve. I only saw to other hookups and there were easily 50 people casting to those fish.

Then, Brandon fell in. Thank God he didn't capsize, but falling in at all in the middle of a channel is not a good situation. Luckily no trawlers or ferries were coming through and we were off to the side of the channel, but that did pretty much put an end to our kayaking there. The bonito had left anyway, and it was going to start to rain.

The day was still young though, and we soon found ourselves on the boat with Phil Sheffield, watching some of the best schoolie striper blitzes of August in a heavy rain squall. But that was legitimately too much to talk about any more than that... 

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

 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, Elizabeth, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Summer Small Stream Giant Brown Trout

In the average summer here in CT, most of the small streams that I fish that remain cold enough for safe salmonid targeting contain only brook trout. Because browns are more tolerable of warm, somewhat polluted waterways and less table to handle very small and nutrient lacking freestones, they are outclassed and out-competed by brook trout in those water. That's a great thing for the native fish, but I do like catching brown trout in small water. From July to the middle of September, my only reliable local wild brown trout stream is also too warm and low to fish. But this year I found small water in CT that surprised me with it's ability to stand up to the hottest time of year. This same water has been surprising me for a while now. It's the stream I'd never caught or seen a trout in until this year; the one that produced the two giants, Dave and Gelb; and a neighboring smaller stream on a parallel course with similar structure and dense wild brown trout numbers.

I visited these streams at the very end of July, more to see what bad shape they were in than to fish them. I was blown away when I got to the first and it was running 60 degrees. I caught a fat female brown trout in the first pool I fished.

I fished that stream as far down as I could, Some of the time just walking and looking, some of the time plopping streamers next to likely cut banks. I caught a handful of browns that, by CT small water standards, were brutes. But by this streams new standards they were the mid-sized fish.

Exhausting the available water there, I decided to head to it's small sister to the north, a stream I'd not fished since early spring but one I'd always had luck in, starting a few years before I started catching trout in the other stream. When I got there it was even colder, but also expectedly low. I decided to stay with my streamer, big though it was for this small water, hoping for size rather than numbers. I knew I could put up 30 or 40 fish if I nymphed, I just didn't want to catch a bunch of fish. I wanted the biggest fish in there... and I think I got it.

Out from under a pile of branches came this monster, eating my fly almost too casually, then sending spay everywhere much less casually after I set the hook. Being in almost no water it didn't have much chance to fight, though it did try to go back into the debris. I basically just put a lot of pressure on it and walked upstream to grab it.  This was far and away a biggest fish from the smallest water record for me. I wasn't even that surprised, I've now seen 10lb fish in this stream system. But really... this stream:

Was holding this fish:

Though almost but not quite 20 inches, this fish was another one worthy of a name, as I'm confident I will see it again. I've settled on Big Spot, hoping that large brown spot under it's dorsal remains a recognizable feature.

I switched to a large Ausable Ugly for the rest of the time on that stream and caught a bunch more quality small stream wild trout. I didn't need another giant and I wasn't expecting one. The variation of color on the smaller fish I ended up with was cool enough that I wouldn't even have minded missing out on another near 20 incher to catch all of them.

Nor would I have traded off meeting this sweet doe for another big trout. I later realized she was probably wandering back to find her fawn which was just big enough to be running around causing trouble on it's own. I found them together on the way back down, running back and forth trough a bush like a maniac, mom looking on and seeming almost annoyed by her crazy kid. 

So, though that was late in July and the conditions have done nothing but get worse since, I'm fully expecting this to be my best big trout late fall and winter ever, and I'm expecting that mostly to be up to this one river system. It's exciting just thinking about the possibilities. And I can't wait to do some night fishing at times of year when most people would write it off too.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

 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, Elizabeth, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Going Vertical

Sometimes in salt, there just aren't surface feeds. Scratch that... most of the time there aren't surface feeds. If you go out and depend on seeing birds or breaking fish, or finding bass or blues casting around structure, you are likely to spend a lot of time that you could be catching fish, uh, not. If I'm not chasing down a blitz or actively casting to working bass, blues, albies, or bonito, I'm almost always vertical jigging, and if I'm vertical jigging I'm almost always catching something. I pull it off with a fly rod, relying on inordinate amounts of weight and tying flies on jigs, but I never turn my nose up at using bait, metals, or epoxy jigs on a spinning or conventional outfit either. It really surprises me to see how many people will just motor around hopelessly or sit around not fishing waiting for something to blow up, when they could easily be catching seabass, scup, fluke, or tautog, among other things.

He who sees the future.

A few weeks ago, after covering a bit of ground looking for fish active at the surface, Patrick Barone and I started drifting and vertical jigging a big bowl between a couple reefs. We both started out using jigs, and honestly I almost stuck to that for the rest of the day. We were absolutely slamming scup, BIG scup. Some of these fish were hefty enough to run drag on dogging runs back towards the bottom. I stuck with a crippled herring for a while, which is actually a pretty large metal to be jigging scup with but was working fine. 

Eventually though I caved and broke out the 5wt, hoping with a two fly drop shot rig I might be able to get a double. I know for sue I had a pair on a few times, bit I just couldn't manage to get both up any of the times I got the chance. I also caught smaller fish overall.

We left them chewing there. It was the best scup fishing I'd experienced both in size and in numbers. And they were also mostly very dark, beautifully colored fish, with some cool variations and a few lighter fish mixed in.

Later that week, my good friend Kirk invited Noah and I out after bonito, primarily. We had bonito up in the early afternoon, but to say they were being obnoxious would be an understatement. Despite a couple hours worth of crazy surface feeds and each of our best efforts to catch one of those picky little bastards, we didn't get any.

Once again, vertical jigging was what made the day. Kirk got a couple of really nice black seabass, Noah and I both got plenty of young of the year seabass and average sized porgies, and I even got a tautog on an un-tipped pompano jig.

There were incredible clouds of silversides around that afternoon, and such biomass often draws attention from more than just the typical players. In this case, we were seeing schools of scup underneath the silversides. It as quite a thing to see, and for me the highlight of the day.

If I haven't already hammered the point home...
Why sit around waiting for a blitz that might not happen or burn a ton of gas looking for one when the ocean floor is practically paved with fish, some of which you probably haven't caught, which are readily hooked with quite simple and inexpensive rigs on spinning gear and a little bit of outside-the-box thinking with fly tackle. I could go in depth on my own approaches, rigging, presentation, and such, but honestly it's not that hard. Dive into the idea of trying to catch these fish and it will teach you more than I could possibly do in writing.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

 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, Elizabeth, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.

Incredible August Striper Blitzes

 A combination of an extraordinary abundance of tiny young of the year bay anchovies and the relatively strong 2015 striped bass year class has lead to something magical this year: large schools of 20-28 inch bass at the surface gulping down 1/2 inch long bait fish off Eastern CT and RI. These slow moving "rafts" of bass are a sight to behold, and although they can readily be caught, it is far more exciting just to be in them. Watch a marvel of nature unfold around you, a scene that should probably be in one of the Blue Planet documentaries.

I encountered my first raft with Rick on August 6th. I had never seen anything quite like it, and at the time I regretted not doing more to document the event, not knowing that I'd be seeing an awful lot more of this over the coming weeks.

The very next day, Noah an I fished the same general are in kayaks. This put us in a great position to get right on the schools, and me a phenomenal photography opportunity. Sure enough, despite much more difficult conditions for seeing this fairly subtle feeding behavior from a distance, we found one raft, and the results were something out of my wildest dreams.

On August 13th Rick and I ere again fishing together, from the rocks this time, when we encountered this behavior again. A number of schools worked around the peripheries of a bay, occasionally getting within casting range. I found it most remarkable to still be able to see the whole school of bass even when they weren't "up", a dark brown mass slowly moving along.

The following day was, to me, the most incredible yet and one of the most memorable days I've fished. My friend Ian Devlin invited me on a run east to explore a number of possibilities. We set out in the fog just as the sun rose. We heard the bass before we saw them.

Throughout the rest of the day we encountered rafting schoolies in a handful of locations, with multiple large schools up within sight at any given moment. We saw them right up in the rocks along the shore and we saw them in 40ft of water. And we saw them everywhere in between. We caught a handful of fish, but we spent as much or more time just taking it all in.

It's a sight that doesn't get old: an acre of bass, shoulder to shoulder, mouths gulping air almost like a surface feeding carp, eating bait so small it just looks like a sparkle in the water. This is something that was very predictable at Montauk not all that long ago. This late summer has been unbelievable here, and it's not thanks to there being a bunch of strong year classes of bass. The famous blitzes at Montauk yielded bass to 15 pounds. These ones here now might hit 10, and there isn't a significant range of sizes. This is pretty much all one year class of fish. What we would all like be a reliable yearly occurrence is not. The truth is, we need to have a very high standard. We want abundance and vibrance, not just existence. Public hearings have been scheduled on ASMFC's Atlantic Striped Bass Addendum VI. (www.thefisherman.com)
Go. Speak up for abundance, and a vibrant fishery. We owe it to these fish and ourselves.

Until next time.

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

 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, Elizabeth, and Christopher, for supporting this blog.