As I wrote yesterday, and what I figured would happen, locating hits on Stripers today was tough.
Had the Gene and Karl Lens party out for a day of Bassin'. Too bad for Karl as he had his two sons with him as the boys were anticipating this trip for weeks. But as luck would have it, this morning was not meant to be with those finicky Stripers.
Had all the bait anyone could have wanted as we netting fresh bunker before setting out for our 7 am departure. Along with the bunker, I stopped by Julian's for some clams as I wanted to be ready for whatever those Bass were hungry for. After sailing through some real slop in a crankin' northwest wind through Sandy Hook Bay, we rounded the tip of the hook and set up our first hookset at the clam beds due to a tip I got that morning from a fellow angler at my marina. That turned out to be a bust and within 30-45 minutes we were off to another location.
During our move, I talked to a fellow charter captain who was working Romer and he informed me that Romer was slow to a bust status, so I decided to try inside Raritan Bay as the northwest winds were backing off to something fishable. Had to watch the conditions very carefully as I had the two boys on the Parker.
Once inside west end of Raritan I tried a few spots to set up anchor and tried chunking as well as clammin but was unsuccessful. Decided, as our last resort, to try trolling with Stretch's around various spots and picked up a short within about a half hour. Saw a few of my fellow charter captain's out there and noticed a lot of movement and the chatter I was picking up was the Striper fishing was off this morning. Very frustrating as my mate Mark and I really put in a valiant try for our party today (we covered 45 miles hunting around) especially knowing that the kids were looking forward to our trip.
Like I say, we report the good and the bad and brother let me tell you, this morning was a stinker by my standards. Base upon what fantastic fishing has been occurring the past 2 weeks, today was WAY off.
I will attribute this to what I hate for spring Bass fishing and that's an outgoing tide. I really think that the late afternoon charters are probably going to hit the bass with the change to incoming water which I strongly prefer over outgoing in the spring. My logs over the past 4 years have shown a clear advantage of incoming over outgoing for spring bass.
So there you have it......not pretty but tomorrow is another day and "that's why they call it fishing and not catching"
Tight Lines,
Capt John
