Striper fishing getting hotter!

It’s been a hot week, for both man and stripers. Despite rather weak tides(plus one foot and up low tides mostly) the fishing has been quite good in the Boston Harbor area, especially the Inner Harbor along the Winthrop/ Deer Island shore and on the flats near the airport.

I’ve been avoiding mid-day fishing and sticking to late afternoon/early evening hours, cooler and more comfortable and certainly more active, with low tides occuring in the latter part of the day/early evening. Luckily the winds have been lower than in the past few weeks and that has certainly helped. There are a lot of baitfish around right now, mostly pogies, some herring and small mackerel, but I haven’t seen much surface action when I’ve gone looking for it. Despite this I’ve been fishing Gurglers on the surface whenever the water’s surface has been calm and have been having some fantastic fishing, both in terms of numbers and size, although these have varied from place to place and tide to tide. For instance, on Wednesday, fishing from a boat near the airport, all of the fish were in the 32″-34″ range, with one fish I estimated at about 40″ although I never landed it. On Friday, fishing the same area the fish averaged about 23″-25″ with only one bigger one in the mix. On Wednesday the action was slower but the fish bigger; on Friday the action faster but the fish smaller. On Thursday I fished from shore along the inside of Deer Island in the evening and picked up six within about an hour and half, again all on Gurglers, nothing larger than 23″ though but lots of fun.

At this time of the year I stay up on the surface as often as I can, even if no fish are showing on top–which is usually the case– and only go deep only when I absolutely have to, which hasn’t been the case at all this week. Why bother dredging them up from the bottom when you can have the thrill of catching them on top? If you haven’t been “gurgling” much this summer, now is the time! (I recommend the white flatwing Striper Gurgler for the most consistent action;it’s large enough to draw up even deep-lying fish and has enough tail action to induce them to smash it.)

If you’ve been finding fishing a bit slow this summer you might want to confine your fishing hours to the low light periods. If they coincide with low tides so much the better. If the wind is light better yet. The tides will be improving (that is, getting stronger) as the week goes on and I expect the fishing to be even better than it has been the past few weeks.