Many coastal fly anglers consider surf fishing to be the ultimate challenge. Fortunately, most of us live within a coffee-mug drive from some of the best surf fly fishing opportunities in the world. Down South, the snook is king, while Up North the striped bass wears the crown. There’s a supporting cast of bluefish, mackerel, trout, and jacks.

Bob Popovics is one of the best at the game of surf fly fishing. He’s been at it for more than 50 years and lives only minutes from New Jersey’s Island Beach State Park, a favorite for striped bass hunters. His surf experience also includes time at surf fly fishing haunts like Martha’s Vineyard, Montauk, and the Outer Banks.

Just back from Vietnam in 1970, the young Marine was eager to get on with his life and get back to fishing with his dad and working at his family’s Shady Rest restaurant in Bayville, New Jersey.  A lunch get-together with high school buddies Jimmy Magee and Butch Colvin (whose dad owned the iconic Cap Colvin’s Tackle in Seaside Park), was the first step in a lifelong fly fishing journey that has made Bob one of the most influential fly tiers of the second generation of saltwater fly fishing pioneers.

The three buddies arranged a trip off Harvey Cedars to jig weakfish, but when bluefish crashed the party, Butch grabbed a fly rod and began casting. “I thought that was pretty cool, and wanted to learn more about fly fishing, so the next day Butch took me to Cap Colvin’s to buy my first fly rod, reel and line,” Popovics says. “I was hooked. It was like therapy, and the process of learning to cast and catch fish was soothing, and great fun. I fished with the fly rod as often as I could.”

Later that winter, Butch gave Bob a cardboard beer flat filled with a fly tying vise, bobbin, thread, and some feathers and bucktail, and said, “You’re going to learn how to tie flies.” Back then, there wasn’t much information about saltwater fly tying, but like the promise of a full moon at high tide, a new organization called the Salt Water Fly Rodders of America (SWFROA) brought a fresh level of excitement to coastal fly fishers with an exchange of information, techniques, tackle, and fly tying. Bob was an eager student.

Annual get-togethers were sponsored by SWFROA and its chapters at places like Tilghman Island, Maryland; Key West, Florida; Newport, Rhode Island; and Sag Harbor, New York. Bob attended one on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where he met Lefty Kreh, who became a good friend and mentor. SWFROA had many well known fly anglers on its board of directors, but Fred Schrier of Toms River, New Jersey, was the dynamo, “the juice,” that drove the new organization.

“I owe a lot to Fred,” Popovic says, “because he was a great motivator, always encouraging me to try new things, and he helped introduce me to so many people like Mark Sosin, Poul Jorgensen, Bub Church, and many others who generously gave me advice and support. Fred’s really the guy who gave me the biggest boost.”

“Surf fly fishing is a very visual experience, and to be good at it you have to be an observer, be aware of your surroundings, the type of beach, the breeze, the currents, and beach structure. Watch everything that happens all around you. Before you make the first cast, walk up to the beach, wait a few moments and observe. Watch the wave sets, get the feel of the rhythm of things before you start fishing. Before I make the first cast I check out the water for signs of bait, cloudy and clear water edges, the formation of bars and points, the location of white water and calm water, and the types of birds in the area. You need patience to be an observer, but it makes you a better fly fisherman.”

Bob likes to keep things simple. He may have plenty of fly gear and equipment in his beach buggy, but keeps only the bare essentials in a shirt or jacket pocket when he’s standing at the water’s edge fishing. “I always have my stripping basket, and like to use a Velcro belt, which is so much easier to get on and off than a buckle-type belt. My pliers are on my wading belt. I pare down what I need to just a few flies and essentials. Instead of taking 20 of each type of pattern, such as crab flies, or bucktail Deceivers, or Jiggies, I take maybe three of each so I have enough on hand to replace a broken-off or fish-chewed fly. I like soft fleece wallets that fit into my shirt pockets to keep a supply of favorite flies close at hand.”

He also keeps a spool of 16-pound tippet handy, and another of 12-pound for very clear water. He usually doesn’t use a heavy mono bite tippet. If blues show up, he has a screw-top tube container in his pocket (like the kind that hold cigars), with 8-inch wire leaders tied with a haywire loop at one end to attach to the tippet. The open end is then haywired to the fly.

“Most of the time I know what to expect when I hit the beach, so if the mullet are running, I take mullet patterns and don’t bother loading myself down with a bunch of flies that probably are not appropriate,” Popovics says. “I do like to have a color selection on hand in case I need to change from a bright fly to dark one, and same goes for short and long patterns.”

Bob favors a 9- or 10-foot, single-hand rod, and says, “Although I’ve tried, I haven’t gotten into the two-hand casting style, and prefer to use single-hand rods most of the time. I like a rod that is not an ultra-fast design. In my consulting work with fly rod manufacturers and in teaching fly casting, I’ve come to like fly rods that have a tad more bend in the butt section as compared to stiff, ultra-fast taper fly rods. Some of my favorites include designs by St. Croix that give the surf fly caster better control of the fly presentation when mending the line or when lifting the line to make a quick cast to reposition the fly. This is an essential feature for any good surf fly rod.”

“When fly fishing the surf, it’s common to retrieve the fly all the way to the rod tip. To quickly and efficiently make the next cast, I like a short, blunt-head line that will load the rod with less line outside the tip. You’re looking to make as few false casts as possible, so a short compact head will load the rod quicker and more efficiently. Use the resistance of the water to help load the rod as you lift to make the backcast, shoot some line on the backcast, then shoot the works on the forward cast. Depending on wind you may need another false cast to reach out to the fish, but always strive for the fewest number of false casts. The goal is to lift for the backcast, shoot, and shoot again on the forward cast.”

“A floating line is my first choice when selecting a fly line. Most fly anglers can dependably cast 50 to 70 feet, and at that distance most beaches will be about 5 to 7 feet deep. A striped bass can easily see the fly at that depth and if you need to go deeper, a weighted fly like a Jiggy or a Clouser Minnow will get deep enough,” Popovics says.

A floater with a short intermediate head is his second choice. “You want to be able to pick up line and recast if necessary, and this is still possible with an intermediate sink tip fly line. You need to do this if the fish moves away from you after you’ve made a cast, or if the fish veers off at an angle from its original swimming direction.”

“A floating line only behaves badly and makes a poor presentation in the surf when you allow the line to be carried away by a breaking wave. You can overcome this by working the line in between the waves, letting it ride and fall with the waves as they roll to the beach. Watch the sets. After six or seven waves, there’s usually a calm area before the next set starts and you can make a nice presentation into this calm water.”

Bob recommends that every surf fly angler learn the skill of mending line. This quick, circular flip motion of the rod tip adjusts the line’s position in a current or wave to keep the fly tracking nicely. If the wave action makes it impossible to control the fly, he uses a roll cast, then lifts for a backcast, and shoots a forward cast to reposition the fly in calm water. “Rod handling becomes second nature, and after awhile you don’t even think about it. The line mending and lifting just become automatic responses to the motions and actions of the waves.”

We all dream of catching a fish so big we won’t have to fib about it, but typical surf-caught striped bass run from schoolies to teen-size and maybe into the 20-pound range. A 30-pounder is an astonishing catch. Even the biggest striped bass will not take too much line, so Bob prefers lightweight large-arbor reels that can hold about 150 yards of backing. “You don’t need a huge reel. The weight of a big reel gets tiring and feels like you have an anchor under the rod. More important is a large spool diameter that retrieves line quickly. Keep in mind that most fish I can play by simply bringing the line in by hand and dropping it into the stripping basket.

“Most reels today are saltwater worthy,” he says, “and it’s probably more important to consider which hand you use to crank the line in. Right or left, the dominant hand is your best choice. A right hander will reel faster, longer, and more smoothly with the right hand; the opposite is true for a southpaw.”

It’s natural to want to walk into the surf up to your knees, but Popovics prefers being higher on the sand because many times the bass will be right in the wash. When fly fishing a beach, the currents and structure are important. The basic current is from the incoming and receding waves, but there are also beach currents generated by wind that often run along the beach. These areas can be worked by letting the fly swing in the current, mending the line as needed to keep in touch with the fly and not let the waves pull line and cause an erratic retrieve and slack.

Bob suggests surgically casting along the beach structure just like a trout fishermen in a small stream. The bass aren’t everywhere; they hold and travel along definite structure such as a slough between the beach and a sand bar, a cut in a sand bar, a point of the beach with white water along its sides, the edges of clear and cloudy water, and also the calm water. “Work all of it,” he says. “Use wind and currents to your advantage when walking the beach. Keep the wind off your non-casting side when possible, or walk with the current a few steps in between casts.”

Bob’s good friend Lou Tabory told him, “There’s no substitute for time on the water,” and Bob echoes that with more good advice, “Even a fishless morning can still be a great day because of the experience earned and knowledge gained. Count the hours, not the fish. Be an observer, look for things, think about what’s going on around you, work the structure, and remember that time on the water builds casting and fishing skills.”

As the premier fall surf fly fishing builds, Bob uses specific fly patterns based on what bait is prevalent as the season matures from September through November. For the early fall, he’s usually throwing Siliclones and Bob’s Bangers to imitate mullet, and Jiggies and Surf Candies to imitate rain fish. When bigger baits are in the surf, his go-to patterns include bucktail Deceivers, The Beast, and Spread Fleyes. Later in the fall, when the sand eel invasion has hordes of the slender baits invading the beach, he’ll switch to longer but skinny Jiggy Fleyes.

One last tip, one of Bob’s favorite fall times to fly fish is the start of a fresh northeaster before the water gets all roiled up and murky, when it’s still clear. “The bass go on binge feed,” he says, “and if the water is real rough, I’ll use a 300 to 400-grain sink tip line to cut through the turbulence.”

Surf fly fishing is popular for many reasons, including its simplicity and nearness to home—and equipment doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. It’s exhilarating when a full-blown bluefish blitz erupts, yet serene and calm as the sun ignites the dawn and striped bass begin to swirl at bait in the trough. Fly fishing the surf is a lifelong adventure that has captured fly fishing pioneers dating back to Rhode Island’s Harold Gibbs, New Jersey’s Cap Colvin, and Maryland’s Lefty Kreh—and it now inspires today’s new generation of fly fishers.

Read more great articles like this one and get expert tips from the legends of saltwater fly fishing in the pages of Tail Fly Fishing Magazine. If you love saltwater fly fishing and wish to improve your game, support conservation causes and become part of a small but incredible community, then subscribe to Tail Fly Fishing Magazine today.

You might also like:

Stripers in the Suds – John G. Sherman

Striper Redux – Jack Gagnon

Worm Hatch – Northeast – Striped Bass

California Corbina: Sight Fishing the Surf

More Articles by Pete Barrett:

Fiberglass Rods for Saltwater Fly Fishing

Who Caught the First Bonefish on a Fly?

Amazing Autumn Fly Fishing

The post Fly Fishing the Surf with Bob Popovics first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Fly Fishing the Surf with Bob Popovics appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

Especially fish, which are harder to see than practically anything more corporeal than ghosts and leprechauns. Who hasn’t heard the defeated tone of a guide on the bonefish flats who realizes that no matter how many times he says, “Ten o’clock, Sixty feet, Three big bones tailing left to right,” his dimwitted sport will cast to the three mangrove shoots six feet astern?

But it isn’t entirely our fault. Prey species are forever contriving unfair ways not to be seen. Brook trout disappeared into the dappled green forest streams by evolving backs covered with forest-green dapplings. Bonefish got themselves chrome-plated to reflect the shining expanse of skinny tropical flats straight back into hostile eyes. Small soft creatures like herring flock together with thousands of other small soft creatures—all of them saying, “Eat them, not me,” and most of them getting away with it. Species that grow from toothsome young prey into large toothy predators look for hangouts where even larger and thoothier predators won’t prey on them.

Take striped bass and flats, for example. When stripers were young and tender, ospreys and herons made skinny sunlit flats into dangerous neighborhoods. But when they reach a  certain size stripers no longer fear aerial assault, and the shallow clear flats are mostly free of the seals and sharks and stern trawlers and soft-plastic Slug-Gos that can make deeper, faster water nervously unrestful, even for a fifty-pounder.

As most saltwater fishermen know, striped bass are creatures the twilight, of movement, of tide rips and swirling bait schools and crashing surf. This makes striper anglers creatures of pre-dawn departures and midnight shoreline stumbles and of live-lining mackerel, deep-drifting eels, and tolling plugs the size of policemen’s nightsticks. Fly-fishing for stripers, like the striper itself, is pure brutality: heavy depth-charge fly lines and ginormous flies and rod-shattering strikes and enough adrenaline to turn a pack of PETA pacifists into foie-gras-eating ax murderers.

Which is why a rippled expanse of alluvial ooze overlain by a few feet of transparent seawater is about the last place a standard-issue striper fisherman might look for a striper, especially with the sun burning high in a cloudless sky.

But that’s exactly where we went looking for them, we being fish-mag editors Dave Klausmeyer and Joe Healy fishing with Eric Wallace and Mac McKeever on a skinny backwater flat on a bright sunny day—the very time when normal Maine striper fishermen were snoozing in the shade after having flamed out on a dawn tide in one of the big brackish rivers or along the near-shore islands, casting into the rips and the surf while jockeying for position with all those other boatloads of coffee-cranked striper fishermen casting into the rips and the surf.

Out there on the windless late-morning flats, it was just us and the sun and the seagulls and the gray stern granite and green pointed firs hemming a small secluded cove. Joe and I fished with Eric, one of only a few Maine guides who specialize in flat-fishing for stripers, and it was a dislocating experience. I’d look back from the postcard view of coastal Maine to see Eric up on the poling platform with his sunblock and sunglasses and, “Get ready, good fish at two o’clock about sixty feet off.” I’d narrow my eyes and roll them around, and slowly a striper would materialize. And then I’d snap out of my no-worries-mon Bahamian bonefish trance and launch a mighty dawn-patrol striper cast that hit the water like an osprey and scared the bejesus out of that striper, then we’d ghost along looking for another to frighten away, with me chanting under my breath, “I’m bonefishing for stripers, I’m bonefishing for stripers. Everybody say Aummmmm.”

Along with nurturing my inner calm, I was also trying to remember the mechanics of spotting fish. You do this, as anglers all should know, not by looking for fish—stripers, with their mirrored sides traced by waving lines, can be as invisible as baby bonefish even when pushing forty pounds—but by looking for the suggestions of fish. At a distance, you see not the striper but the impression of a striper: its shadow on the bottom, the flick of a fin, the flex of a tail, the dart of a jaw snarfing a green crab, grass shrimp, or sand eel.

Compared with the hyperactive tent revival of striper fishing in the surf, sight-fishing the mirrored flats is Zen: the quest becomes its own reward. Like dry-fly fishing, it’s a form of aesthetic self-denial that slows your pulse and makes you see.

But it isn’t a way to run up numbers. For the day, we each boated one fish and lost another. With a dawn assault on a big tidal river, that would be an official defeat. But for flats fishing in Maine it was a success—and possibly the birth of an addiction.

There’s always a genesis moment when something new materializes from the fog. Angers to the south wont see fly-fishing the flats for stripers as anything new—the big flats off Cape Cod’s Monomoy Island or Long Island’s Great South Bay have long been home to a minority cult of flats-fishers. But here in Maine, stripers on the flats have been pretty much invisible, and fishing for them the way they need to be fished for, which is to say slowly and carefully without even a trolling motor’s cautioning whisper, is beyond novel.

Mac McKeever, the senior PR wallah at L.L. Bean, is the first person I know to have done it., though I know other people who were rumored to have done it but didn’t want anyone to know. Like most significant discoveries, Mac’s was an accident.

“Ten or so years ago,” he said, I was pulling my skiff at a boat ramp, and a telephone worker was having lunch and asked how I did. I told him I’d caught a few fish here and there, and he said he was working high atop a pole at a nearby bluff overlooking a shallow white sand flat, and he’d seen loads of fish milling around in the skinny water. I went over there, and sure enough, the flats were haired over with the things—some big ones, too! I’ve been on them ever since, at first climbing atop coolers and then library step stools or teetering on the outboard’s cowling to try for a better vantage point to spot fish.”

Finally Mac got a proper poling platform made for his sixteen-foot Aquasport, and now he spends his days fishing the Pine Tree State Caribbean-style: long light leaders, little crab flies, and clock-face casting. “Pretty neat stuff,” Mac says. “Clear shallow water, light sand, and black-backed stripers hunting for crabs.” And a few—a very few—anglers on the flats hunting for stripers.

A year later, Jerry Gibbs and I met Mac at a different beach—his original beach, the lineman’s beach—at the leisurely hour of half past eight, a time dictated in part by the high-noon low time and more significantly by the sight-fishing necessity of high flooding sunlight. Which, as is typical with a trip planned well in advance, didn’t arrive.

With intermittent cloud cover and the hot southern breath of a looming storm, even Mac had difficulty spotting fish before they spotted us. Through the morning we saw more than thirty stripers, most past twenty inches and a few past three feet. I managed a cast to only one taking fish, and when he turned on the fly with his open mouth, he spotted the boat fished like a partridge. The lesson: flats-fishing for stripers is a chose-your-day kind of thing. If the weather’s right, you go; if it isn’t, you do something else. Unless you’ve driven 125 miles through coastal Maine tourist traffic to fish. Then, you go anyway.

And I learned another lesson: Stalking those fish and getting that single, turning, almost-a-take in skinny transparent water was as exciting as dragging a dozen depth-charged stripers from the foaming deep. Perhaps that’s a personal vision not everyone can see. But then, not everyone needs to.

A few weeks later, sparked by a near connection with what was here along, if only blinkered eyes could see, I revisited a few neglected flats not far from home, where, bluff-top observations with high-powered binoculars revealed drifting shadows too big to be mackerel and too reposeful to be sturgeon.

In just the right light, I could envision a big Hudson Bay freighter canoe ghosting along with its motor kicked up beneath a simple poling platform made from aluminum pipe bent in a friendly nearby muffler shop, a scrawny old man leaning on a long black push-pole and shading his eyes from the noonday sun. He sees something moving, eases the pole into its rest, and then slowly lifts his fly rod and casts.

It might be a good striper in my vision—I hope so, anyway. or it might be a stick of pulpwood drowned in the mudflat since river-driving days. It probably doesn’t really matter. In either case the electric anticipation is pretty much the same.

Bio: James R. Babb is editor emeritus of Gray’s Sporting Journal. He is the author of four collections of angling essays, the most recent of which is Fish Won’t Let Me Sleep (skyhorsepublishing.com).

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Acquiescence

The post The Vision Thing – James R. Babb first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post The Vision Thing – James R. Babb appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

When it comes to flies, I’ve always had an innovative attitude that I believe is due to my occupational background. As an AutoCad draftsman for the better part of 20 years, I’ve been able to use my everyday computer skills at home on my hobbies. When I sleep, I guess you could say that I’m haunted by fish-shaped foam.

Materials

• Hook: Mustad 3407DT O’Shaughnessy (or equivalent), Size 2/0
• Thread: Danville 210 Denier Flat Waxed Nylon
• Head: 2mm Craft Foam Sheet (craft store or fly shop)
• Adhesive: Super Glue
• Loops: 20- to 30-pound monofilament or fluorocarbon, 12 inches
• Beads:  Glass Beads – 3/16” to 1/4” diameter (Typical for 2) (craft store)
• Body: Letera’s 4” Magnum Dubbing by American Tied Flies (or equivalent)
• Eyes: Prism, self-adhesive, 3/16” to 1/4” diameter
• Body Art: Paint Markers, Airbrush, etc.
• Finish Coat: Flex Seal Liquid (Clear) or UV Flex Epoxy

Step 1

Starting at the hook eye, wrap a base of thread toward the bend a little less than half way. Wrap thread back to the eye before beginning step 2.

Step 2

Fold a 12-inch length of mono or fluoro in half, leaving a loop at one end. With the loop end, starting behind the hook eye, use the thread to tie in the mono, keeping both 6-inch lengths side by side on the top of the shank and down the bend, matching the wraps from step 1.

Step 3

Starting with the bobbin hanging near the hook point, place one glass bead on either tag end of the mono. Keeping both tag ends as even as possible, roll the mono forward, creating bead loops. Make about six wraps and adjust the length of the mono loops before continuing to tie in the remainder of the mono.

Step 4

Cut the remaining tag ends of mono behind the hook eye and wrap in completely. When completed, the loops should still be loose enough to allow the beads some freedom of movement.

Step 5

Starting with the bobbin hanging just ahead of the hook bend, tie in the first layer of body hair (belly color). Leave approximately 3 inches of hair extending beyond the bend. Finish wrapping any remaining hair along the hook shank.

Step 6

Matching the start point and length of the first layer, tie in second layer of body hair (back color). This time, pull the forward portion of remaining hair backward to be used as filler. When pulling the hair back, be sure to add a few wraps ahead of the hair to lock it in. Whip finish and prepare the foam head using the provided pattern.

Step 7

Once you have the foam head cut out and pre-glued into a tubular shape, rotate the fly 180 degrees and take a moment to test fit the foam head and see how you would like it to sit. Once satisfied with where the head will be positioned, put the head aside and add a few dabs of Super Glue along the bottom of the hook shank. Using a bodkin or toothpick, spread the glue evenly along the bottom and sides of the shank.

Step 8

Once the glue is spread evenly along the thread, slide the foam head over the hook, being careful not to let the foam touch the glue until it’s in the correct position. Let the glue set to the foam for about 15 seconds.

Step 9

Flip the fly right-side up. If you have not already done so, use a bodkin and poke a hole in the foam lip where it will be pushed over the hook eye. The hole should be approximately 5/16 of an inch up from the end of the lip. Carefully stretch the foam down and over the eye.

Step 10

Add prism eyes and any other body art, if desired. I’ve found both paint markers and airbrush paints hold up well when using a finish coat.

Step 11

Put a finish coat on the entire surface of the foam head. I prefer Flex Seal clear liquid, but it requires 4 to 6 hours of drying time. Use UV Flex Epoxy for faster drying times.

To learn more about Carl Harris’ innovative fly patterns,

you can visit his Online Store, Instagram, or Facebook pages

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The post Soft Chew Wiggler 2.0 first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Soft Chew Wiggler 2.0 appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

Visual excitement aside, there are other good reasons why you should add surface flies—popping bugs, sliders, and hair-heads—to your bag of tricks. First, nothing gets a striper’s attention like a wounded baitfish, and there’s no better way to transmit distress signals than with a popping bug. While a streamer must pass through the fish’s field of vision to trigger a strike, poppers can summon fish from a distance. A striped bass’s lateral line is ever alert to low-frequency waves such as those generated by baitfish in trouble; it gives the fish a sensory “radar” that extends out to around 50 feet. Therefore, the surface commotion generated by a popper or hair-head attracts fish that you may have missed with a more subtle subsurface offering. In short, when fishing for striped bass, don’t hesitate to ring the dinner bell!

Topwater Fly Designs

Surface striper flies fall into two broad categories: popping bugs/sliders and hair-headed streamers. Popping bugs and sliders typically are made of one of three types of material: cork, balsa wood, or most commonly foam (such as the closed-cell foam from which lobster-pot buoys are made). Most striped-bass poppers range from about 1/2 inch to 5/8 inch in diameter, and from 1 inch to an 1 1/2 inches in length, minus the tail. Poppers much larger than this become difficult to cast.

The tails of most popping bugs are made of either bucktail, saddle hackles, or a combination of hackles and marabou. Saddle hackles allow for a longer tail, but the commotion produced by a popping bug creates the illusion of a prey item much larger than the popper’s actual size.

The bodies of sliders tend to be slimmer than those of popping bugs, and the face is often cut to a V. Sliders are meant to move across the surface quietly, creating a wake that the bass still feels. Sliders are particularly good in calm water and, unlike poppers, they can be deadly after dark—especially when bass are picking off small baitfish on the surface. Despite the slider’s subtlety, bass will hit them just as hard as they’ll hit a popping bug. Under the right circumstances, fishing a slider can be like pulling your fly through a minefield.

When fishing shallow over structure like rocks, seaweed, or grass, there’s a chance you could hang up on something other than a fish, and you’ll do well to use a fly that has some buoyancy. Streamers with heads made of spun or flared deer body hair work well in such situations. The late Bill Catherwood’s Giant Killer series of flies are the prototypical hair-heads, dressed in a colorful melange of saddle hackle, marabou, and clipped deer body hair that striped bass find irresistible. A full-size Giant Killer runs seven to nine inches long, and the construction technique doesn’t lend itself well to a fly half that size. So if you’re looking to throw the sardine rather than the full kipper, you’ll do well to go with a more basic pattern. One of my favorite hair-heads is Lou Tabory’s Snake Fly. It sports a wing of of ostrich herl flanked with marabou that has a lot of inherent action in the water. It’s a deadly-effective pattern that’s relatively easy to tie and lends itself to a size-2 to 1/0 hook.

The Outfit

For striped bass, consider the size of the flies you’ll be casting before you consider the size of the fish you might encounter. Although I feel an 8-weight outfit is adequate to handle any striper I’m likely to hook, I often fish a 10-weight rod, simply because it makes casting the largest poppers and hair-heads much easier.

I’ve read about anglers fishing popping bugs with intermediate lines, but I feel a full floating line gives a bug its best action. If you find casting popping bugs a challenge with a standard weight-forward taper (that is, a head in the vicinity of 40 feet), one of the shorter, more compact tapers being produced by such manufacturers as Airflo or Royal Wulff might help you better turn it over.

Striped bass aren’t particularly leader shy, so it’s unnecessary to use a long tapered leader with a popping bug. Six feet of level 15- or 20-pound test monofilament is ideal. Should you wish to build a tapered leader, keep it simple. A three-piece leader no longer than nine feet that tapers to 15- or 20-pound test is sufficient. If there’s a chance you might hook into a bluefish, consider adding eight or so inches of 60-pound mono or wire to the tippet as a bite guard.

Where and When

Popping bugs can be effective wherever bass are found—in tidal rivers, off beaches, in bays, near jetties—but they’re not for all occasions, and I limit their use to specific situations. During the day, I generally won’t use a popper in water less than six feet deep. Shallow-water stripers tend to be spooky, so your chances of catching these fish are better with a streamer. Exceptions to this occur in the spring and fall, when you’re likely to encounter schools of bass smashing bait tight to the shore. During this wild surface feeding a popper can be deadly, as its prominent silhouette and the commotion it causes enable fish to key in on it immediately.

Poppers are also good for attracting fish from deep water. Over holes and drop-offs, where a streamer might go unnoticed, a noisy bug is sometimes just the thing to make the fish come up and take a look.

Popping bugs are also good searching patterns. If you draw a strike with a popper but your next dozen cast casts go unnoticed, switch to a streamer. Conversely, I’ll tie on a popper as a change-of-pace fly when streamers aren’t producing.

The most productive times to fish popping bugs, in my experience, are in the early morning and the late afternoon until nightfall. Although stripers will feed readily on the surface after the sun has set, for reasons I don’t understand, poppers just don’t seem to produce after dark. For proper night fishing I’ll tie on a slider.

Don’t hesitate to drop a popping bug into any likely bass-holding area—the mouth of an inlet or tidal pool (particularly on a falling tide), or in the middle of a rip. In rivers, I’ve had my best success by casting directly across the current. In particular, work the edges and eddies.

If the setting doesn’t lend itself to a popping bug but you’d still like to play the topwater game, don’t hesitate to tie on a hair-head. One of my most memorable hookups came a number of years ago when I was fishing with my old friend, Captain Dave Tracy, who used to guide around Boston and Plymouth. It was a July 4th weekend. We had had some good fishing in the morning, and it was now coming on noon. We had bright sunshine, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature was approaching 90 degrees. Dave had us drifting along a rocky shore in Plymouth that used to produce well on a coming tide. We were within yards of a crowded sunbathing beach, with fairly heavy boat traffic behind us.

Dave was used to having to produce for clients, so he fished a Clouser Half-and-Half on a sinking line a large percentage of the time. He wanted me to fish one now. I could tell I was annoying him. I was standing on the bow, throwing a full-size Catherwood Herring (one I had dressed—not an original) 90 feet toward shore, then skating it back across the surface in foot-long strips over a field of submerged boulders. (I may have been trying to impress a girl who was with us—I can’t quite remember.)

“You really have confidence in that big fly…?” Dave asked.

I was about to tell him that I had more confidence in the fly than in the location, when a bass appeared from the bottom—if it wasn’t 40 inches, it was close—and slammed the Herring. I was tight to the fish, but instead of running to deeper water it headed toward shore, into the rocks. Seven seconds later, it was all over.

I think Dave and I both learned something that day.

Cast, Retrieve, and Hookset

Some fly anglers believe you must form fairly open loops to cast popping bugs. This applies more to casting weighted flies, which take on their own momentum. (Bringing a weighted fly through a quick change of direction, as you do when you form tight loops, jars the cast.) Popping bugs are more wind-resistant than they are heavy, so forming a tight loop will carry the bug farther, more efficiently, than will an open loop.

When I first began pursuing striped bass with a fly rod, my only previous experience with popping bugs had been fishing them for largemouth bass. In fresh water, a popper can suggest anything from a large insect to a small bird or rodent. In the ocean, however, a popper imitates baitfish, period. The pop-and-wait retrieve so effective in fresh water is useless in the salt. To get a striped bass to smash a popping bug, you’ve got to keep the popper moving.

Start slowly at first, using short strips to move the bug three or four inches at a time, kicking up water every now and then. If that doesn’t draw any strikes, intersperse the retrieve with a few longer strips to suggest the erratic behavior of baitfish in trouble. Convey panic by stripping quickly, skittering the bug across the surface. At times a choppy two-handed retrieve is effective. No matter which retrieve you use, the important thing is to keep the bug moving.

Whether hitting out of curiosity, or attempting to stun prey with a slap of the tail, a striper doesn’t always take a surface fly into its mouth immediately. Raising the rod on such hits will not only result in a miss; it will pull the fly out of harm’s way. Instead of trying to set with the rod tip, keep the rod tip close to the water and pointed at your bug during the retrieve. Pay attention—the interest a striper shows in a popper is often subtle. If you see a swirl behind your bug, or if the bug’s wake seems unusually large—get ready. Chances are a fish is inspecting your fly.

If you rouse a fish but draw no strike, cast back and work the same area again; a striper that’s shown interest seldom passes up a second chance. If the fish strikes, keep your rod down and continue to strip line. That way, if the fish doesn’t take, the bug will still be in position for the fish to take another swipe. I’ve seen bass slap at a bug as many as four times before they finally took it. Only when you feel the weight of the fish should you strike. One sharp strip is often enough to set the hook.

A Floating Sand Eel slider has produced well for me when bass have been slashing at naturals on the surface. I’ve also done well with it when there was no surface activity, usually in calm waters in the evening or at night. With sliders, and particularly after dark, I’ve found a continuous retrieve is most productive. Retrieve the fly hand-over-hand and brace yourself for an explosion—it takes nerve to fish a slider well.

Retrieve hair-heads with single strips of six to 12 inches, or use a continuous retrieve. In heavy current or rips I like to let them swing as you would swing a streamer on a trout river, adding an occasional strip for interest. Although hair-headed flies do absorb water and may eventually sink, they’ll ride close enough to the surface that they’ll remain snag-free, and you’ll still see every take. (To watch a short instructional video on topwater fishing for striped bass, visit my website, the address to which is listed in the byline.)

If catching striped bass on the surface turns out to be your cup of tea, you might consider taking the flies, gear, and techniques to other fisheries. Jack Crevalle love a popping bug, and Puerto Rican tarpon will absolutely crush a Catherwood Giant Killer. Lou Tabory’s Snake Fly is my favorite fly for false albacore, particularly around Harkers Island. Watching a 20-pound tuna launch itself out of the water to clobber your fly may just be enough to get you to put your sinking lines away for good.

Bio: George Roberts produced the first video fly casting program devoted exclusively to salt water: Saltwater Fly Casting: 10 Steps to Distance and Power. He’s also the author of Master the Cast: Fly Casting in Seven Lessons (McGraw-Hill, 2002). For more information on fly casting and fly angling you can visit George’s website: masterthecast.com

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The post Bass on Top first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Bass on Top appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The mythical Clouser minnow. It’s a unicorn when tied in white. This is a fly that is much more than the sum of its parts, a classic over/under fly designed by the living legend Bob Clouser himself.  They are beasts at catching fish. This fly design may be responsible for catching more fish than any other pattern in the world. Bob designed a fly that is easy to tie, tough and incredibly versatile. He designed a fly that could catch literally almost any fish that is reachable by a fly and is effective in both salt and fresh water. When the correct materials are applied in the right proportions to a hook they become something almost magical, a juggernaut amongst the legends. The Clouser dives down, jerking violently to the surface when stripped. It seduces fish into violently striking with its wounded bait fish action.

Quick think of a fish. The Clouser can catch it.

Recently on a trip to Mexico for a wedding, I was able to escape for half-a-day to explore some rumored flats right in the hotel district of Cancun. I strung up my 8wt., tied on a unicorn and headed out to the flat I had located with some internet research a few days before. With my white Clouser sailing away, I moved across the flat. Boom, my line goes tight, the first victim to the Clouser’s deadly allure is a blue runner. I want his big cousin to come to the fight. The Clouser gets a little beat up but looking good and is still in for another street fight. We push on.

Within a few minutes the second fish is on the hook. The unicorn displays its mythical powers over fish as a barracuda slams into the fly. My 20 lb. mono is surely no match for the teeth of this ferocious predator. Adult barracuda have a striking power greater than some sharks. The unicorn takes this in stride and lip hooks the toothy rocket. A short fight, some nice jumps and the barracuda comes to hand. Second species today

I continue to cast toward the flat’s edge; the tide has not risen enough to bring the fish up onto the super shallows. My Clouser is now significantly shorter as the deer hair didn’t fare well in the scrap with the cuda. I curse not using super hair. Bruised and beaten up, about 20 minutes later another predator grabs hold of the legendary Clouser. This time a yellow fin mojarra is hooked. I inspect it and pull my beat up fly out of its strange mouth. Lots of moving parts! A picture or two and it’s another smooth release.

At this point in the game you can hardly recognize the fly as a Clouser. I think about changing. I open my box… argh! Wrong box. All I have are Deceivers. Stubbornly, I continue with my beat up fighter. I still want to catch fish!  “Only a few more casts until I will head home,” I tell myself. I cast way past a few. No bites or action for a while and I start to think about my long bus ride home and why I didn’t bring more Clousers. I continue to fish. All of a sudden on a strip, my lines comes tight. The Clouser has done it again! As I fight the fish, I’m trying to guess what it is: horse eye jack, pompano, blue runner? Who knows what I will find on the end of my line. Attached to this worn out old Clouser comes a yellow fin jack, a small one no doubt but my best fight of the day. My fly is spent.

The legendary Clouser has taken its licks today seducing four species into striking. With her dance, she slips through the water teasing and aggravating fish. I will take the Clouser far. Plans are already in place for the next trip. I will travel to Scotland.  I am tracking down the 36/0 hooks and super hair in four foot lengths, my custom 26 wt. rods are being made as we speak. Once and for all I intend to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. The Clouser can do it!

Until next time, do yourself a favor and tie on a Clouser Minnow.

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MORE BLOGS ABOUT FLIES & FLY TYING:

Ten Flies You Should Never Be Without

Fly Tying Instructional – Craft Store Crab

Books by Tail Contributors

Characteristics of a Great Bonefish Fly

The post The Magical White Clouser first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post The Magical White Clouser appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

As I was sitting in front of the fireplace this February (don’t laugh, we’ve had WAY too many nights in the 30’s here in South Texas this winter) preparing my fly box for an upcoming trip to the Bahamas I started pondering a question that was posed to me by my good friend Joe: how many fly patterns do you really need. Sitting and opining, I came to the conclusion that I probably carry many many more flies than is necessary. Thinking further, I decided that if you consider the food items of our saltwater quarry, they really all fall into a relatively small group of prey. Although they may look a little different, behave a little differently and be present in varying sizes, there are a small group of flies that I believe are effective regardless of the species you’re pursuing. This is true especially if you’re willing to play with your presentation depending on the species, time of year and the prey you are trying to emulate.

1) “Toad” Fly: I may get a little push-back here from some of the purists as the Toad can be pretty non-specific but I love Toads in all shapes, sizes and colors because of their versatility. Depending on the presentation of this fly it works very well as a bait-fish, crab, shrimp or even an attractor pattern. The key to being successful with the Toad lies in the retrieve. Find the right retrieve and you’ll catch fish.

2) Gotcha: Once again I have chosen the Gotcha pattern for it’s versatility. Although slighter in build than the Toad, the Gotcha can be presented in such a way that it emulates various food items and will draw strikes from a wide variety of game fish whether they’re feeding on small crustaceans or bait fish.
3) Deceiver: Although the Deceiver is not quite as versatile as the previously mentioned patterns, it is in this angler’s opinion the quintessential bait fish pattern. Countless patterns have been derived from the Deceiver over time and many of them work well but if I can only choose one it’s going to be the Deceiver.

4) Clouser: The Clouser, much like the Deceiver, is a versatile bait fish pattern. The coloration, size and retrieve will be the determining factors in the success of this pattern but unlike the Deceiver, the Clouser can be the ticket in deeper water when you need to get down in the water column in order to entice predators.

5) Mantis Shrimp: To this point, my selections have been less specific in nature covering a large array of prey items for various species of game fish. However, I have successfully fished mantis shrimp for nearly every species of warm water game fish in the shallows.

6) Merkin: Also known as Del Brown’s Permit fly or the Carpet Crab. The Merkin is my all time favorite straight crab pattern. Although this fly is specifically a crab, the coloration and size can be changed to fit the specific conditions and game fish. I’ve taken more redfish on the flats on this fly than any other in my box (try it in black for redfish).

7) Crazy Charlie: Although the Crazy Charlie (originally the Nasty Charlie, Orvis changed the name for marketing reason some time ago) is similar in nature to the Gotcha I like having both in my box. I think the vinyl body of the Crazy Charlie gives it more of a 3 dimensional appearance in the water and acts to reflect light better in all directions. Once again, the Crazy Charlie works well as a small baitfish or crustacean depending on the retrieve.

8) Seaducer: The Seaducer, although it may not appear so, is once again a very versatile fly. It suspends well in the water column and if fished with quick, short jerks can pass as a bait fish. However, when fished slower and allowed to breathe I believe that it works well as a large crab imitation. I have taken quite a few bull reds feeding on top on blue crabs with this pattern.

9) Gurgler: Having at least one true top water fly in your box is a must. Even traditional bottom feeders like redfish and bonefish will pound a top water if the conditions are right. Let’s face it, even if quite a few fish strike and miss, there’s nothing quite like a top water explosion at the end of your tippet. I prefer the Gurgler because I believe that the basic design gives you the best opportunity to vary your retrieves in order to create different effects. There are quite a few variations that make this fly a versatile option for all types of fishing.

10) Muddler/Bonefish Slider: Ok, ok I know, these are two different flies that swim and perform differently as they emulate different prey. The Muddler performs well as a baitfish pattern (I’ve probably caught more species of fish on a Muddler than nearly any other fly in my box even when forced to fish that drinkable water) I think the Slider is probably seen as a crustacean (crab) by our finned amigos. However, I couldn’t choose between the two. More than once I’ve been in a hurry and quickly grabbed one instead of the other and caught fish!

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MORE FLY TYING BLOGS:

CRAFT STORE CRAB
CLOUSER MINNOW
CHARACTERISTICS OF GREAT BONEFISH FLIES
SIMPLE REDFISH FLY

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The post Ten Flies You Should Never Be Without first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Ten Flies You Should Never Be Without appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The last striper has barely ended its annual fall migration when my friends and I start thinking about warmer waters in the coming spring. This is the time for the annual gathering of stripers for the cinder worm spawn which begins about the first week of May. When the water approaches the 60 degree mark in the shallowest and darkest of salt ponds, the conditions are ripe for localized worm populations to become active. It seems early in the season as these relatively tiny bodies of water are a new discovery for me, but I love every moment of it. Better yet, the early activity in these shallow waters makes the worm fishing last longer since the bigger bays and creeks don’t get going for another week or more. When the worms are hatching, every striper in the area seems to know about it, and they all show up for the feast.

It was a windless and unseasonably warm May afternoon and we were adrift on a mid-sized South Cape embayment when my companions thought they saw raindrops — the scene shifted in my mind to something more like hatching bugs and rising trout. This first encounter with marine worm spawns was many years ago but the memory is still vivid. As my friend and I moved closer we saw cinder worms swimming all around us. The feeding fish were all stripers, and we thought they would certainly take our baitfish patterns. How wrong we were and we quickly learned that there are few more selective fish on earth than striped bass in a “worm hatch”. We are still learning!

The timing and location of the worm activity is local and often secretive. It differs by size, species, coloration and movement of the particular worms present. For the scientific folks among you the cinder worms are Polychaetes which refers to their segmented bodies, and are of the Nereis genus. This grouping includes hundreds of species of worms including sand worms and clam worms . The literature in the scientific community describes them as 1 – 3 inches long with a head that is usually olive and a body that is pinkish. As noted before this varies quite a lot. All are burrowers though that develop paddle tails when they spawn. During this time, they swarm to the surface releasing sperm and eggs in a frenzy. Then, the adults die and the eggs sink to the bottom. The right conditions are a matter of contention including lunar phase, diurnal responses and the temperature of the mud and water.

Regardless of all the science, in early May the most common of these creatures in my favorite waters are small (size 6 or 4 hooks) and tan or root beer in color. They swim with the tips of their tails in a stiff jerky motion. Getting the fly to look right in the water is of paramount importance, and time has proven to us that coloration differs on a location by location basis. Most scientists who have studied these worms agree that the worms move so little from their natal mud that they have developed almost like subspecies. In slightly varied environments, the same species can span a range of hues from tan to almost red but all the worms in these micro-environments will be the same. One salt pond will have tan worms and another nearby will have red ones. Permanent markers in pink and red are a must with your tan flies to adapt to conditions. You can also tie a selection in a bunch of different colors, but a successful pattern one day may not be the right choice for the next. I have hundreds of failed patterns that prove that. Also, there are often so many worms present that it is difficult to get your imitation in front of an actively feeding fish. As the years went on, we tied flies that worked subsurface most of the time and some newer versions with foam gurgler-type heads to keep them on the surface creating more disturbance as they moved. Our earliest attempts at these imitations were tied with marabou or yarn bodies, all in red with black heads but they proved far too delicate and were too flexible as well. Newer flies are more restrained in their wiggling movements and much tougher rabbit strips with the skin left attached to the fur. But on our first day fishing amid all this activity we knew nothing of how the flies needed to appear.

After that first unsuccessful exposure, we were back the next afternoon again on a rising tide and with similar weather conditions. This time, we had worm flies we copied from trout patterns made of chenille, modified in size. There was no internet available to us then to get more information quickly, but we did manage to catch a few fish. Our best results were from either drifting the flies like nymphs as we do for trout, or keeping them near the surface with short twitches. Fishing in current flows the fish roamed less and held position more like trout in a stream which gave us something familiar to look at. These flies were not long lasting and fouled frequently so the approach was soon discarded. We continued to work on our ideas for a few weeks. Then, as suddenly as the “hatch” began, it was over. There was not a worm to be found and the stripers wanted baitfish again.

The next spring it was the third week of May and my phone rang after 9:30 at night which is far from usual. It was a friend who had been out looking for stripers and found the beginnings of the worms for that season. I was not living close to the fishing at that time so I left work early, drove an hour to the Cape and launched my kayak in a small cove. To avoid spooking the fish in the shallows, stealth was necessary. Carefully the stern of my little craft was slid onto a sandbar to hold my position while casting. It was 6:00 pm and the wind which had gusted strongly all day was down. There were a few worms around but little activity. I chose a simple rabbit strip fly I developed over the winter and cinched the #6 hook tight to my 16 pound tippet. Casting to slightly deeper areas in front of me where a few fish were starting to feed, I used short inch-long twitches of the fly that made it appear lifelike among the few worms. My first cast was short, working a spot only 10 feet from the bow of the kayak, but it was met by an immediate strike that proved to be a 22 inch fish. That was followed by 4 or 5 others of almost the same size, which was better than I expected in such a small area. The number of worms seemed to be increasing quickly when I noticed a small movement of water in a tiny tongue of current about 20 feet away. The tide was dropping and it was likely the fish would move soon but cast after cast my offering was ignored. The fish moved a lot of water with each natural it consumed, and finally it found my fly among the now hundreds of worms.

As I strip-set the hook, the fish hesitated then ran toward the mouth of the cove. I rocked the kayak free of the sand, and began paddling quickly with my left hand. The fish was pulling me and my little craft out of the cove and as we gained speed the paddle became a rudder. I prayed aloud that the leader would hold as the Nantucket sleigh-ride continued for several minutes. Finally the kayak was alongside the striper, a great fish which measured 42” that I carefully revived and released. By then, it was pretty dark and as I deployed my lights it became obvious that we were in the middle of the bay at least a half-mile from where we had started. It had all been kind of a blur of time and space. I paddled back to my truck, as anything else that night would have been anti-climatic. One thing should be noted however lest it be overlooked. The sparse number of worms at the beginning of this night helped me get my imitation successfully in front of more fish.

A few days later it was time for us to go back to that same cove on foot. We found a few fish feeding and worked hard to cover as much water as possible. There’s a lot of private property in that area which makes access difficult. It was in the process of working around that marshy area that we stumbled on a small acre salt pond with one outlet to the bay. Though the pond was very little it was full of feeding stripers. The fishing was very good. When the action was over, the only difference found was the smaller body of water was a bit cooler as there was a spring-fed area. The temperature must have delayed the “hatch” by a few days. We’ve learned that generally ponds and even bays with small outlets that do not drain completely on each tide tend to have longer lasting spawns, but temperature is a factor that needs to be watched. Also, if you are ready for the lack of sleep involved, false dawn the morning after a large spawn will often find stripers cruising areas where dead or dying worms injured during the night are carried by the current, and they are feeding actively on baitfish that have congregated there.

Most anglers think this worm activity is only a spring phenomenon and for some species of worms that is true. However, there are other worms in the marine environment active at other times. I’ve encountered some in very early spring before the stripers arrived to eat them and occasionally located some nice white perch as a result. Other worm populations have been spotted at warmer times of the year, often after small bays have become so warm that stripers have left them until fall. These appear to be Neris virens (sand worms) and Neris succinea (clam worms) which in our locale seem to appear later. There have been some in winter (look like virens) as well along shallow beach fronts that were locations where cold weather populations of cod once fed. This past fall, fishing creek outlets for the last of the migrant fish, we caught bass on Clouser minnows and hooked sandworms as well. I wonder if worm flies would work there?

OTHER BLOG POSTS ABOUT STRIPED BASS:

MIRACLES OF THE FALL
STRIPED BASS ON THE FLY
STRIPERS PAST AND PRESENT

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The post Northeast Worm Spawn first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Northeast Worm Spawn appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

As I walked onto the beach at this time last year, the feeling of potential seemed oddly liberating, as if the previous months’ incarceration by snow had been some weird exercise in solitary confinement. In the darkness, I edged toward the end of the jetty as the current pushed against my legs. The tide was already in the second third of the flood and running strongly. Stripping off a generous amount of line, I began to cast crossways into the current and let the fly drift into the seam where the tide formed a back eddy against the rocks. On the second drift, the line tightened up in that characteristic way and like a semi-forgotten reflex, I strip set and felt the fish dart out into the current where it began taking line. It was a small striper, but on this seventh day of May in the early dawn, it was a great striper.

Writing in 1948, O.H.P. Rodman noted in The Saltwater Fisherman’s Favorite Four that the spring arrival times of the striped bass on Massachusetts’s South Shore and in Rhode Island differed by about two weeks. Looking back at the logbooks of his friends Harold Gibbs (former RI Fish and Game Director and pioneer fly rodder) and E.N. Strout, Rodman noted that each angler’s location reflected the time lag in the fish’s migration. During the 1945 season, Strout, an observant bridge fisherman from Duxbury, took his first fish on May 6 and the following year, on May 8. Gibbs, living in Rhode Island, encountered the fish on April 24, 1945 several weeks before they entered Buzzards Bay and began their northward climb along the South Shore.
Rodman’s own indicator of when the fish would arrive was the classic shadbush. Growing along the Weweantic River in Wareham, Massachusetts, their white blossoms typically emerged concurrently with the bass’s appearance in Buzzards Bay. Some inspired anglers in the twenty first-century continue to check the shrubbery (though more have turned to websites) in the hope of catching fish at the head of the run. While many aspects of the New England coast have changed, the arrival of the striped bass is still unerringly similar to when these anglers during the immediate post-war years were finding good fish returning up the shore. For them, it was perhaps a miracle as well. Rodman, born in 1905, fished extensively during his youth and knew well that the demise of the striped bass clubs on Cuttyhunk and West Island during the late nineteenth-century was due to the disappearance of the striped bass in the following decades. That the fish should have returned during the inter-war years must have seemed like a miracle especially to those who had witnessed the population’s inexplicable decline.

Sometimes, my sense of time changes while fishing especially in those pre-dawn hours. It is not difficult to imagine the old surfcasters rambling amongst the dunes in old Model A Fords, shining tin squids by moonlight and feeling the spray from their Ashaway linen lines. Fly fishing for striped bass is not a new occupation despite the feeling one might get from reading tackle advertisements. Harold Gibbs of Barrington, RI fished extensively for stripers during the Second World War and perfected the Harold Gibbs Striper Bucktail, an early Atlantic silverside imitation. With a mixture of white capra hair for the body (eventually replaced by bucktail), it involved a blue swan feather on the sides to add the bluish tint that he observed in silversides. Rodman writes that in one season, Gibbs used his patterns to great effectiveness, catching a total of 800 stripers. Certainly a feat seventy years ago, it is still an admirable success today. The Gibbs Striper Bucktail embodied characteristics that were early for its time but have remained central to modern saltwater patterns. A white body still conveys the impression of a baitfish since so many prey species in the northeast have lighter undersides and contrasting lateral colors. The only thing Gibbs lacked in the 1940s was greater synthetic color variation that could bring out the subtleties between species, such as a silverside and a bay anchovy.

My first striper of the season revived quickly and dove down into the rocks, dousing me with water. At 4:45am, this provided as good a jolt as a cup of the house blend from Coffee Obsession in Falmouth. Fully awake, I continued casting and caught several more school fish. Striper fishing, Frank Woolner has said, is a “strangely narcotic addiction” and nothing in my experience has worked to disprove him. Like a mental rolodex that continually flips through tides, wind directions, moon phases and bait movements, the striper angler’s mind is never at rest. These first fish of the season have set it in motion once again, as Woolner, Rodman and Gibbs must have felt it so long ago. Striper season has begun!

MORE BLOG POSTS ABOUT STRIPED BASS:

DECLINE OF THE STRIPED BASS
MIRACLES OF THE FALL
STRIPED BASS ON THE FLY

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The post Stripers Past and Present first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Stripers Past and Present appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

(from the Flyfishbonehead species pages)

STRIPED BASS ON THE FLY

STRIPED BASS LOCATIONS
The heaviest concentrations of striped bass on the east coast are from Massachusetts to North Carolina. On the west coast from Oregon to southern California and in land-locked lakes like Lake Mead near Las Vegas and the Santee Cooper reservoir system of South Carolina. They thrive in all kinds of conditions but are seldom caught far from shore. In Massachusetts, for example, they are well known for feeding in the surf of Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquiddick Island. Conditions here can be challenging for fly fishing but right behind the island is Cape Pogue Pond where the water is often flat calm and perfect for wading and fly casting for stripers. The diversity of habitat for this species is nowhere more obvious than in New York. Montauk Point is legendary for surf fishing for these fish and there are fly fishing enthusiasts who succeed here when conditions are right. Heading back toward New York City is Long Island Sound. This body of water is about 125 miles long with dozens of harbors on both the north shore (Connecticut and Westchester, NY) and the south shore (Long Island and Queens, NY). Every harbor has rock piles and beaches frequented by these fish. Early morning drifting and blind casting works well, as does wading where there is access.

STRIPED BASS FEEDING HABITS
Striped Bass feed most actively at dusk and dawn, although some feeding occurs throughout the day. During midsummer, they tend to become more nocturnal. Stripers are particularly active with tidal and current flows feeding on fish, crabs and clams along the shore as they are tossed about in turbulent water. Striped bass will eat just about anything. They have been caught on every kind of baitfish, sand worms, blood worms, ribbon worms, clams, crabs, squid, and grass shrimp. The problem is they most often are focused feeders; feeding exclusively on one of the above mentioned until full, often switching to something else on the next feeding cycle which is usually tide driven. Many of their food items can be hard to duplicate with a fly. Sometimes the bait guys make out best, but usually a fly works incredibly well. Of all the bait fish around, stripers feed most heavily on sand launce (commonly called sand eels), spearing (commonly called silversides), and menhaden (commonly called mossbunker). The latter is the most difficult to simulate as the body shape of the fish is flat and deep, requiring the materials to stay fluffed in the water rather than collapsing to a thin profile when the fly is stripped in. Using a keeled hook helps keep that shape. When stripers are feeding on baitfish many generic flies of the right shape and color will do the job. The most common are Joe Brooks Blonde series bucktail flies, Lefty’s Deceivers, and Clousers with green and silver being a good bet. All of these can be fished on floating or sinking lines.

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EQUIPMENT FOR FLY FISHING FOR STRIPED BASS
If you don’t want the expense of having a sinking and floating line or seldom use a sinking line, then a great addition to your arsenal is an Instant Sink Tip System. This is a temporary and simple loop to loop sinking tip that you attach to your fly line and then your leader to it. It is 5 or 6 feet long (depending on main line weight) and will take your fly down at about 5 feet per second, of course not as deep as a true sinking fly line. Note that this weighted addition takes a little getting used to as it changes the dynamics of the way your rod casts since it is “tuned” to the original weight of your fly line.
Then of course there is the aggressive nature of the striped bass. Like all bass, they can be “bothered” into striking. A fly rod popper directed at a sighted target or cast blindly on calm waters is quite irresistible and will usually invoke an explosive strike.
Tackle-wise, most fly rodders chasing striped bass fish 6 to 10 weight lines, the choice governed by wind conditions more than fish size. Most of the fish will be in the 3 to 20 pound range and they fight!  When stripers go on a feeding frenzy, they drive entire schools of baitfish to the surface where water is splashing everywhere, terns and gulls are screaming and diving, and baitfish and bass are flying into the air. Almost any fly will work then. To further demonstrate their range of habitat we look at the East River, Harlem River, Hudson River and New York harbor itself. All of these hold huge numbers of striped bass and with the right conditions (mostly tidal) they are great targets for the fly. To continue enumerating places to fish would just be to drone on. You get the idea; striped bass can be found almost anywhere and are great targets for fly fishing.

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The post Striped Bass on the Fly first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Striped Bass on the Fly appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

“Salty Breakfast” is a feature article in the November issue from Jamie Howard (Howard Films) who just released the three part film series “Running the Coast.  1,000 miles from Chesapeake to Maine with the Striped Bass.”
Read it in the November issue of Tail
AND
Check out the trailer here:

About HOWARD FILMS:
If you don’t feel it, it doesn’t count. We built our foundation on that premise in all of our films, and in a place where we often return – the water. Whether it’s striped bass (or rockfish) in the Cheseapeake Bay to Maine, tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys, Bonefishing in the remote Bahamas or trophy bass fishing in the unknowns of California, we don’t sleep until we find the magic is collected. With both fly rods and conventional, Andy Mill, Billy Pate, Tom Rowland, Bill Dance, Bobby Barrack, Andy Smith, and Greg Myerson are among the anglers to sacrifice with us as we try to make the best outdoor films ever made. Howard Films has won awards for every film we’ve produced, but the fact is all that matters in the end is you feel something real.

LINK TO RUNNING THE COAST

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The post Running the Coast for striped bass first appeared on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.

The post Running the Coast for striped bass appeared first on Tail Fly Fishing Magazine.