Yesterday was incredible!

The past 24 hours has been unreal!  This was by far the two best striped bass fishing trips I have ever had.

If you haven’t already guessed, in addition to blogging and running charters, I also commercial fish for striped bass.  I’ve been fortunate enough to have commercial fished for bass since I was 14.

The fishery has always been a huge help for me and has allowed me to basically do exactly what I love to do most.  Any tidbit of knowledge or insight you find here on this blog came as a direct result of the commercial striped bass season.

I understand that some folks aren’t happy with commercial striped bass fishing – which is of course OK with me.  Sometimes I’m not thrilled either when folks on big expensive sport fishers are gaffing bass for market.

However for me the fishery has always been a real crutch and something that I have heavily relied upon each summer of my working life.  I hope to someday not rely quite as heavily upon the commercial bass season, but for right now I most certainly do.

Aside form the economics I really enjoy the feeling of providing a high quality, locally caught food for families all along the eastern seaboard.  There’s something really “Cape Coddish” there.

Honestly I probably should have been born back in 1700′s when Cape Cod fishing was at it’s glory!

So with that in mind it all began yesterday at 4pm with a good friend of mine Brian McCowan.  I had high hopes that the onshore breeze of the past day would spark things fish wise. Man did it ever!

I cruised along the beach in just 20 feet of water looking for signs of life.  Over the years I’ve noticed that with an onshore breeze, the bait and bass seem to hold tighter to shore.  This is not always the case, but more often than not your odds of finding fish in shallow increase with an onshore breeze.

After a few miles of cruising we found our first school.  Unfortunately all we could manage were a few small bluefish so we decided to continue down the shoreline.

At around 5pm we hit the mother load!  Huge orange arches all over the sonar – we were in business.

Instead of trolling we opted to cast eels.  We had the “school of all schools” directly under the Miss Loretta.  Fortunately for us they were on the feed big time.

The next 1 hour and 15 minutes was completely insane.  It was a constant dance around of doubles and triples.  Both Brian and I were sweating profusely trying to keep up with the bent rods.

At the end of the mayhem we had boated 30 bass with the average fish weighing in at 32 pounds.  Almost 1,000 pounds of striper, I could not believe it.

The best technique during this trip was pitching live eels.  Perfecting the live eel thing is a little tricky but I’ve put together a few quick videos in the members section that should at least help get you started.

You can click here to check them out.

So yesterday I again had Brian on board.  We launched hoping for a repeat of Wednesday and we were not disappointed.

We headed right back to our honey hole and continued pitching live eels left and right.  These were some of the most aggressive bass I have seen in a long time.

We would reel one fish to the boat and there would be another 10 bass all in the 30 pound range fighting over the eel which had slid up the braided line.  Absolutely unreal.

To make a long story short we boated another 30 bass today averaging 27 pounds.  This was one serious school of big fish.

Hopefully these fish stick around for the weekend crowd.  Only time will tell I suppose.

Click here for more information on this trip and the techniques used.

Take care, tight lines and good luck!

Ryan

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