Steelhead time

With the striper season behind me it's time to get ready for steelhead!  I went through and organized some of my boxes to see if there were any flies I feel like I need for this season.  This box is looking pretty good filled with sculpins and flashy leeches.  One week away from a full week of swinging flies looking for a tug from some NY and MI steel.

A day to remember

I figure if I keep going fishing eventually I'll have a good day.  Last time out striper fishing I had a day I'll be sure to remember for a while.  Headed out with my friend John on a beautiful, fall day that felt more like July than the end of September it was so warm and humid.  The day started slowly with no sign of fish at the first spot and it took a while to hook up in the second spot where John caught a small striper.  It got a little more interesting when John hooked up a much larger fish that broke him off in a frenzied thrashing on the surface at the end of a long cast.  From there it was my turn and I experienced some of the best big striper fishing I've had on the Maine coast.  For the next couple of hours I spent more time fighting fish than I did actually casting.  The only disappointment I had was losing what I think was the largest striper I've ever hooked.  After landing a few good fish I hooked one that didn't feel anything like the others.  It was a whole other class of fish.  It powered it's way out into my backing with a few slight pauses.  I put a lot of pressure on the fish but never felt like I had any control over it.  At one of the pauses my line went slack and at that moment I thought I broke the fish off only to find out after retrieving my line that it pulled the hook.  I was a little in shock but was happy to get the chance to even play with such a beast.  Here are a few pics from the morning that I hope you enjoy.

Guitar Minnows

Guitar minnows are my go to fly for stripers in lots of different conditions. I turn to this fly when I'm done fooling around and feel like I need to get a fish in the boat. It is a clouser variation developed by Jim Bernstein at Eldredge Bros. Flyshop in Cape Neddick, Maine. One might think it is nothing more than a clouser minnow at first glance but there has been a lot of thought that has gone into this fly. There are subtle differences that come to mind such as the weight and placement of the eyes, the gills, and angle of the bottom bucktail to give balance to the fly and probably more that Jim could point out. He even has fine tuned the presentation of the fly. Put all these things together and this fly is deadly.

This fly is more commonly tied with white neck hackle for the tail.  The fly can have a little different wobbling or twitching action when tied with the feathers.  I prefer the bucktail version since most of the fly is bucktail already, the fly body swims and flows in the same motion.  Olive/seafoam/white is the original basic color scheme I was shown and fished although a bronze top is quite popular.  I tied up a few more variations to match other basic baitfish color schemes and also to test out additional flash.

Here is a very good, detailed step by step video and recipe from youtube done by Jim.

I added a link to striper flies in the navigation bar at the top of the blog with some more guitar minnow pics.  I hope to keep adding more striper flies to this page as I get around to tying and photographing them.

Striper taken on a guitar minnow Sunday.