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Noah and I headed out under dreary skies one November hoping to find some big striper blitzes. Some had been happening in the days before, and indeed that very morning in a different area. It had rained a lot the before, though, and that often puts striped bass into a lethargic mood sends the bait packing. We were still hopeful that a large biomass of stripers would be around, especially since there had been tremendous numbers in the days prior. Our first drift on a key mud flat produced a 28" bass for me, and multiple boils and hits for both of us including with some particularly good fish. That made me very hopeful. Subsequent drifts came up empty.
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| Morone saxatilis |
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| Alosa mediocris Morone saxatilis |
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| Morone amaricana |
Until next time,
Until next time,
Some days I don't find quite what I set out looking for... many days, frankly. I spend a lot of exploring new water, or fishing familiar water at new times and in new conditions. I have to do this to stay on top of things. I'm trying to have a running schedule of what goes on everywhere I fish throughout the year. One evening a little while back I was looking for bonito. I was not finding said bonito though, and there weren't really bass around to pick up the slack. I did have my 1wt with me though, and that provided me an opportunity to do something a bit different when I found a school of peanuts being disturbed by hickory shad late in the day.
It seems to be a bit easier to get hickory shad feeding on very dense peanut schools than it is to get schoolie bass. If the Triple P is off, hickories are your friend. Sinking a fly under the peanuts and fishing the periphery is effective, and it doesn't seem that matching the profile of the peanuts matters at all.
I could have just used my 5wt again, but I wanted to really test the 1wt. Anyone that has caught these shad knows they fight pretty well for their size. I figured the little rod had just enough backbone to land fish without killing them. I was right, I had no problem adequately fighting these fish. It was certainly more fun though. I have an old Ocean City reel on that rod right now and the drag is really loud. So far though I hadn't had the chance to hook a big enough fish to really make it scream. The hickories did just that. It was awesome.
Of course, hickory shad are a delicate fish compared to most. If you aren't prepared to give them everything you've got on such light tackle, or to take them home with you, don't use a 1wt. If you utilize the strategies I highlighted in my recent fish fighting post though you'll have no problem safely catching and releasing shad on a 1 to 3wt fly rod and 4x.
As the sky darkened more and more I realized I had to slow down my retrieve until I was hardly moving the fly at all. Most of the fish ate it as it sunk. I'd make a cast, let the fly fall, and suddenly I'd be tight. I didn't need to set the hook, the fish did it for me. Eventually though the feeding diminished too much and the bite was over. It sure was fun while it lasted, and far better than giving up after failing to find the bonito.
Until next time,
Hickory shad are typically a species I wait until late fall to target. That's when they're often most abundant locally, and often the are the most fast paced game in town in November. There seems to have been either a pattern shift or a significant increase in their total numbers. Last year I was occasionally catching them in odd places and at odd times and seeing far more than I'd typically expect. Nothing, though, compared to what I saw this week.
I was looking for mackerel, frigates and chub mackerel specifically. When I got to the long jetty I intended to fish, there was about three acres of tiny young of the year bunker being eaten by what I though was probably some schoolies and small bluefish. I took a couple photos then just moved along. That sort of setup usually isn't very productive anyway, the "triple-p" (peanut to predator proportion) as Noah and I coined it is usually off- too much bait, too few predator fish. The fly gets lost in the fray and you don't catch much.
The mackerel were rude, though. Basically as soon as I got there, everything left. I spent a couple hours hopelessly working the water column with just one small black sea bass to show for it.
When the tide eventually turned, I decided to head somewhere else. As I walked out though, the peanut blitz was still going on. I stopped to make a few casts and see if I could pick up a fluke or something else picking up scraps from the bottom under the chaos. Instead, I discovered that it was actually hickories enacting violence on those little peanuts, and that the were perfectly willing to slam a small Clouser. There were a bunch of guys there fishing already, but aside from the one guy next to me targeting fluke I didn't see anyone catch a thing. They were all fishing presentations that were much too large, and they likely didn't know what was really going on. I on the other hand was catching goofy acrobatic shad every cast and very much enjoying it. Eventually I was trying to photograph the jumps of each fish I hooked. What would have been much easier was having someone else hook and fight the fish while I photographed, but this had to be a one man operation. This is what resulted:
Until next time,
There are many things the year 2020 could be known for. Many, many things. But in my mind, 2020 will forever be the year of the greatest hickory shad blitz in the history of Southern New England. If you are a surfcaster or saltwater fly angler and fished in the fall season of this year, you probably didn't miss it. It wasn't a one location blitz, or a single day event, but a near coast-wide event that has spanned weeks. From what I'm hearing it may still be in progress down south in New Jersey and even as far as South Carolina. It isn't really a singular event, but this year without question gave up the most stellar hickory shad fishing I've ever experienced.
I intercepted the blitz in the final days of October on my home turf. I was fishing water I knew well, water I'd seen so much action in over the years -plenty of hickory blitzes included- but nothing like this. On the 28th I was on my own, and hickories were my first priority. That said, I started out taking quick looks at a few places that used to routinely hold big stripers in the fall. They are no longer as productive and I subsequently found little in the way of fish. I was then fully focused on shad.
It was slow at first, not a notable blitz at all, but I was picking off some fish. Hickories battle magnificently, often being compared to baby tarpon because of their acrobatics. I've caught both, that's really not as accurate a comparison as one might think. Frankly I think fisherman are far too caught up in the idea of comparing species ("poor man's tarpon," "poor man's bonefish," "poor man's salmon") instead of just taking a fish species with it's own merits. Hickories are awesome fish and a hell of a lot of fun, that's all that matters. And though I definitely wasn't hammering them, I'd gotten 10 of them before the sun set and was pretty pleased with that.
With the sky now darkening and the little school under the bridge I'd been fishing pretty disturbed because I was catching them, I decided to make a move. I didn't go far but oftentimes a mile or two makes a huge difference. My first five casts at this new spot made it clear that something special was going on as each got at least one take and resulted in a large hickory shad to hand. That didn't change for the next hour and a half. I was catching fish continuously for the rest of my time fishing that night. It just never stopped. A swung grizzly Homer Rhode Seaducer was my the best method, though I'd started out with a Dave Bitters Baymen Clouser which was just a bit too big.
I left with the front of my waders slime and scale caked, but I wasn't satisfied. I wanted to see what I could feel and hear occurring in the darkness. The next day the conditions were different, it was warm but very rainy and windy. This time it was Noah and I. We went straight to the spot, and it was immediately clear that chaos was underway. There were hickories, there were stripers, there was bait spraying and predators swirling in the wind disturbed muddy water. We were into fish right away. The hickories were often leaping on the take, which lead to plenty of missed strikes but was so spectacular it was hard to care. They were doing this to the natural bait too, and at times you could look out over the channel and see dozens of iridescent fish leaping into the air. This was without a doubt one of the coolest things I'd seen all season.
The stripers were mostly working in a pocket where wind was blowing white bait into shallow water and along a rip rap bank where some schoolies of peanut bunker were. At times they drew my attention away from the shad, and I did catch plenty of bass as well.
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| Seaducer in traditional colors. This simple old saltwater fly has become such a key fly in my arsenal. |
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| I often break into my stash of black and purple redfish flies when fishing for stripers in murky water, the same sorts of flies I'd fish somewhere like Mosquito Lagoon. |
Though the stripers blowing up the in the pocket were exiting, the shad were still the headliners. I had never seen so many of them.
I rarely seek anything resembling peace in fishing but saltwater fishing especially. Even in the long, quiet nights of spring that sooth my soul after an icy winter, my greatest hope is to have a large striped bass shatter the peace completely and give me an adrenaline rush that will last days. It's days like the second of this great shad blitz that stand out. Wind and rain made simply being outside for an extended period of time uncomfortable and there was so much going on it was almost overstimulating. Noah and I were riding high on the phenomenal fishing. It was gloriously exciting chaos. Peace isn't what I seek when I'm fishing, and though I do often find it, it's the chaos that keeps me wanting more. Because damn, was that ever fun. We caught dozens of big hickories that hit and jumped like madmen and we were the only ones there experiencing that mayhem. I'd like to do that again some day.
