As soon as we arrived at our usual first spot to look around, several small bluefish showed themselves along a ripline. We decided to have a little fun and stretch our lines on a few of them. We rigged up shock tippets with old flies and hooked fish on just about every cast for maybe 20 minutes before we decided to check for some stripers at a few other regular haunts.
Bluefish Double
Bluefish littered the surface everywhere we looked. They can often plague a striper fishing trip, out-competing bass and destroying flies, but on this day they proved a necessary ally to our success with linesides. When we finally found the bass we were looking for, the seemingly endless bluefish schools in the area drew most of the other boats to them, leaving the bass all to us!
The schools of blues were more obvious than the bass. They ravaged baitfish at the surface while flocks of terns and gulls bombed from above. The striper feed was much more subtle, they glided slowly across the surface exposing their dorsal fins and the tops of their tails. They were holding tight to one corner of the reef, on most drifts you only had a couple shots at the fish and then it was over. The birds, being occupied with the bluefish leftovers, didn't bother to follow the stripers so you really had to look for them.
Myself and Chris with a couple of the average fish from the morning.
The stripers we caught averaged 28-30 inches in length, a great size fish for a fly rod. Only a couple were under the legal size of 28 inches. As a bonus I landed the lunker of the day, a 36 inch fish, weighing somewhere in the mid to high teens (my biggest striper on fly to date!) The bite was finicky at best and the preferred flies were small and flashy to match the peanut bunker they were feasting on.
The 36" bass took me well into the backing of my 10 weight set-up
It was a fun morning as always with one of my oldest fishing buddies, Can't wait to do it again!
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