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.

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