It’s a rainy, windy, all-around dreary day today here in Winthrop, a poor day for fishing but an ideal one for catching up a bit with my blogging. So here goes.
The past few weeks have been among the best of the year for striper fishing in the Boston/Winthrop/Revere Beach area. In fact, in many ways some might say that it’s been the best in recent memory, at least where large stripers are concerned.
While bopping around Boston Harbor and nearby waters in my friend Mel Harris’ 21′ foot Eastern, I’ve seen enormous schools of very large (12″-14″ almost two-pound) pogies, the water absolutely black with them in places. And under these schools are some amazingly large bass! I’ve seen (but haven’t caught myself) more large bass in the past week than I can recall seeing in many years, with many in the thirty to forty pound range. There have also been many large bluefish in the inner harbor as well, some up to twenty pounds.
Most of the schools of pogies have been hanging around the inner harbor near Winthrop Harbor, along Deer Island, the airport flats, and also Spectacle Island. They’re not hard to find, either. Even though you’ll see no birds working on them (they’re too large for just about anything but an osprey), you’ll surely find lots of boats gathered around the schools, boats full of anglers trying to snag these pogies and live-line them for the stripers that are often lying deep beneath them. This is by far the most effective way to catch these large stripers.
If you’re a flyfishermen out after one of these behemoths, you’ll need a lot of patience–and luck–to get one of these fish to take your fly, since these fish are not often feeding on the surface crashing into schools of bait or if they are they’re not up for long, maybe for a very short period in the early morning and then again in the early evening hours, which is when you should target them if you’re looking for surface action. But don’t count on this activity lasting for more than a brief period. With food so plentiful these large stripers can feed at will–and when they’re fed they stop feeding. Your best bet is to use a fast-sinking line with a large–at least 8″ long–fly attached to your leader and to fish it very deep and very slowly along the edges of a school of pogies–and hope that you can tempt the fish to take it. As I said it takes a lot of patience–and luck–to fool a monster bass when the large pogies are as plentiful as they are right now.
Fortunately for flyfishermen, this isn’t the only scene on the water. In addition to the pogies there are lots of other baitfish around right now: silversides, herring and smelt among the most numerous. In the past few days I’ve been finding these baitfish in good numbers along the outside shores of Winthrop, Revere, Lynn and Nahant. In contrast to the large pogie/large bass concentrations in the inner harbor, these baitfish attract smaller stripers and blues, with the average striper in the schools I’ve been seeing being around 25″.
I went out yesterday with my friends Mel Harris and Dale Linder in Mel’s boat, the WindKnot II, and we had constant action all along Winthrop Shore from the Faun Bar over to Seal Point and also along Revere Beach and out in Broad Sound between Revere and Nahant. There were birds working over large schools of stripers (and bluefish) almost everywhere we looked, both inshore and offshore. After the past month of relatively slow fishing, these were welcome sights indeed. It looks like it’s going to be a great October with lots of fine fishing ahead.
One interesting thing to be noted here is that in addition to fish feeding on schools of baitfish I found several large pods of stripers feeding on krill as well. These fish were massed tightly together with their shoulders and noses often out of the water sipping and slurping up these tiny creatures. Sometimes their activity was accompanied by flocks of swooping terns, which made
finding these fish rather easy but just as often there were no birds accompanying the school and
you had to look for nervous water or noses poking up among the waves.
There are many anglers who find krill-feeding fish difficult to catch–and they can be at times since there’s just so much food available and they often seem to swim along with the mass of krill with their mouths open and their eyes shut. But this situation is really one of my favorites to encounter. The stripers are often not spooky when feeding on krill and will allow you to approach them quite closely, a real thrill if you enjoy observing fish feed. And they’re really not difficult to catch. Not really. The most important thing to remember is to choose a fly that will either float or will sink only an inch or two beneath the surface. This is the zone where the fish are doing most of their feeding and they will often show a reluctance to take a fly fished out of this zone. My favorite flies are small Gurglers (#4-6) with marabou tails (I sometimes fish two at a time), Krill flies (I often fish one Krill fly attached to the bend of a small Gurgler to keep the fly up “in the zone”). I’ve also had a lot of success with a large chartreuse and white or all-white BMG (another fly that is designed to fish well either on the surface or just beneath). As important as choice of fly and the “zone” you’re fishing is to remember to fish the fly very slowly with a minimum of motion; these fish will often not chase a fast-moving fly. Why should they when there’s so much food in front of them that they can suck up with almost no effort?
Although a lot of the fish activity I’ve seen lately has been offshore, the wading fisherman shouldn’t despair. I’ve been out wading from shore a few times this week and have done well fishing around the Five Sisters in Winthrop, the Cherry Bar in Revere, and also at the mouth of the Pines River at the end of Revere Beach. The best times have been a couple of hours before low tide to a couple of hours after low tide. I’ve not seen many schools of busting fish close to shore–not yet– but there are enough “strays” to make it worth your while to pursue them. And I can only believe that it’s going to get better in the coming weeks.
With the weather forecast not very promising for the next few days, I probably won’t be out fishing but will be home catching up on my tying orders and doing some tying for myself–and you can bet
I’ll be up a lot of Gurglers and BMGs–not to mention some more Krill flies.
If you’ve been waiting all year for the fishing to “get good” NOW is the time. It doesn’t get much better than this!
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