Lit Up!

Striper Fishing has Lit the F*@^ Up!

The striper fishing was lit up, both literally and figuratively last night and tonight. After a 3:00pm put in on the start of an outgoing tide in Niantic yesterday, fishing went from slow to good. I'm pretty limited in where and in what conditions can fish my little skiff. Had a few blue blitzes and 4 short stripers on the outflow from 3:30-4:30. Working up Two-Tree, Bartlett's, Harkness and back to Black Point was completely unproductive. With storms approaching, I decided to head back into Niantic Bay and hit a few spots I like. Trolling T&W I had a strike within a 100 yrds, and thus began 2 hours of catching 25"-27" stripers with one monster that ripped the road out of the holder (ESPN worthy highlight catch on my part) and spooled my light trolling rig almost twice before breaking off. Couldn't sleep until 2:00am thinking about the hardest hit and run I have experienced in a while. Tonight we decided to cheat Mother Nature again, and left Stonington at about 4:00 just as high tide was peaking. Fishing with Jack Balint from The Fish Connection in Preston, whom I fish with several times a year and always have a great time. Jack specializes in light tackle and fly fishing, so we were working with GLoomis Pro-Green rods, light Stradic and Penn reels, 12lb.test and 7" pink and amber sluggos. Plan was poke around from the east of Fisher's until the tide picked back up, but 5 minutes out of Stonington we were on the fish. Right off the bat I was into a fish in the mid-30's (inches) and it kept going from there. Even as the tide went slack, the fish kept biting. You could see stripers on squid and ink blotches as the squid sought to escape. It was easy to follow the sluggos and see the fish moving in for the big surface strikes. It was a race to see how much fishing we could get in with the massive storm bearing down on us. Completely lost count of the fish landed in the 2 hours before a mad dash back to the barn. Most were in the mid-30's. Can't imagine (well, I can) what a few more hours at that pace would have been like.