Striper time

After all the good reports and having only one very slow trip so far this year I was dying to get back out in the salt to try and find a few stripers.  John splashed the boat at about 4am and we were off.  We knew there was some serious wind and rain coming later in the morning and we had some other stuff to take care of during the day so we tried to squeeze as many casts as we could into about 5 hours.  We pulled up to one of our more consistent spots and I was instantly into fish.  I put 3 solid stripers in the boat in the first 5 casts.

We caught a few more before the action slowed as the sun came up.

It didn't take long before it clouded up and the rain came.  We fished around some big schools of mackerel feeding on some small herring for a while.  For a few minutes a school of larger stripers came to the surface among the mackerel and were feeding on the small baitfish also.  We didn't manage to hook up any of these fish and as fast as they popped up they were gone again. 

We went off looking for fish again and found some close to our first spot.  The bite picked up as the rain intensified.  

Hero shot of John because he is my hero.

 

The guitar minnow was definitely the fly of the day and both John and I caught all of our fish on them.  We had a few hits on some bigger grocery flies and deer hair creations but never got a solid hookup on them.

Swimming off to fight another day.

Definitely one of the better mornings striper fishing for me the last couple of years. It still seems strange to me to be catching fish of this size this time of year without catch any little ones.  I hope we get a few good year classes of fish to fill in behind these guys.