Stripers at My Feet: Another Nor’easterBlitz in Less Than a Foot of Water 

I was standing on a bar 200 yards from dry land, in water that barely covered my boots, and there were striped bass swimming right in front of my feet.

Whitewater in every direction. Peanut bunker in the wash. The backs and tails of stripers cutting through the foam close enough to touch.

And an hour earlier, I was pretty sure I'd made a mistake even showing up.

Nothing. Then Everything.

Yesterday morning I hit a beach in this area of the Cape in conditions that would send most people right back to bed. But most people aren’t addicted to fishing like us MFCC’ers. The wind was howling out of the northeast, 25 to 30 miles per hour, maybe more. Big waves were rolling in. It was rough.

When I got on the beach around 9:30, there was nothing. No birds. No bait. Nothing. So I did what I’ve been doing all fall: I started walking and kept my eyes on the sky. About 20 minutes in, way off in the distance, I saw it. A flock of birds going crazy.

Now, I’ve heard from some of you that you’ve been running into plenty of birds lately with nothing but bait underneath them. No bass. I get it, and it happens. But where I’ve been finding birds, there have been stripers under them almost every time.

So I started power walking. When you see birds like that, you never know how long the window is going to stay open.

The Wade Out

Here’s the catch: the fish weren’t on the beach. They were feeding on a bar a good way offshore.

To reach them, I had to wade roughly 200 yards through knee-deep water. And once I got out there, it hit me fast: this is not a place to fall down. Between the waves, the current, and the deeper water right off the edge of that bar, losing your balance in these conditions is serious business.

But then I looked around, and I was right in the middle of it.

Bass in one foot of water at my feet. Bass busting at the far end of my cast. Stripers chasing peanut bunker through the suds all around me.

It was a beautiful thing.

Why the Popper Didn’t Cut It

I love throwing big topwater plugs when we get these northeast blows. It’s usually my first move.

It took about two casts to realize today was different.

The wind was so strong my line was getting blown all over creation. The popper was getting swallowed up in the whitewater, so the fish could barely track it. And the seagulls were going absolutely nuts for it.

I did catch a few fish on the popper. But the last thing I wanted was to get tangled up with a seagull in 30 mph wind while standing on a bar in the surf.