Stripers & New Friends

Stuart Row brought a friend of his along today as we headed out and attempted to get him hooked up with a nice striper, a fish he had never caught before. Dave is quite the accomplished fly fisherman, but apparently has done much lake fishing for stripers. We started at the barge tie up on the southwest side of Long Island. Stuart caught a pair of nice rockfish right off the bat, and missed another - but then the bite shut down.  We moved up to the top of the island to try the southern most drop off near the Osprey nest, but no stripers were showing up on the graph.  Earlier, when we were getting bait, I got a nice batch of threadfins that I just could stand to throw out, and man am I ever glad I didn't.  Since we were up near the Osprey nest I decided to rig up my Stradic 3000/7' St. Croix rig with a live bait Carolina rig - 1st pitch laid a perfect 3" yellow tail up on the shallow flat next to the big stump that sits at the base of the Osprey next and no sooner had it entered the water and wham! a beautiful 4.5# smallmouth crushed it.  It was a fantastic fight on that lighter tackle.  I caught another smaller smallmouth (~1.5#) on the very next cast. We then moved down around the east side of the island and Dave finally got to experience the ferocious fight of a rockfish.

Dualin' Stripers

A first for Dave

4.5# Bronzeback