Amityville Horror? - Part 1

Did I mention that the weather doesn't always cooperate with the schedule of the weekend warrior?? I'm certainly not afraid to get out in the cold, but in a kayak, one has to draw the line when the combination is 20-35 degree weather and 15-20+ mph winds. Since I haven't fished since my last post, and since my co-worker Mike has been buggin' me to tell this story, allow me to take you back to early November to a fishing day I'll be talking about for a long time...

WARNING: Women, hide your children...
No, this isn't going to cover any Linda Blair Exorcist-like head spins or demon-possessed homes... What it does chronicle is 3 knuckleheads (this time, in a boat) out in the Atlantic in search of our number 1 quarry; the ever-evasive big Striped bass. Since our adventure starts at Amityville Marina, in yes, the same Amityville, NY that the infamous possessed home story comes from; it's only fitting that we were able to manage our own private horror story. ;))

November 4th, 2013

Mike is a fellow co-worker and weekend warrior kayak fisherman. He was pretty much a straight-up saltwater surf-caster until we started talking about fishing a few years ago. For me, it was all about freshwater fishing until I got the Striper bug. Mike, on the other hand, didn't do much freshwater fishing. There's not a lot of good freshwater fishing spots in shouting distance of his home, so when he got the time to fish, he wanted to go after the "big boys." At some point, another co-worker and good friend of ours, Jim, turned us on to a reservoir a short drive from work. After a few trips there after work on Fridays, Mike was on his way to being a freshwater fisherman. Soon after that, I had him looking at kayaks...

Anyway, the 100 or so miles between our residences (he in NJ and me in CT), doesn't allow Mike and I to fish together much, but we finally had an opportunity. A mutual friend of ours, Brian, had been trying to get us to make a trip to Long Island's south shore for a day of fishing for a couple years. Knowing that Stripers were starting to make their way into the waters near to where he keeps his 32' boat, we finally agreed to set aside a day. November 4th was a clear, sunny day, highs were expected in the low 40's with winds forecast around 9 mph in the Amityville area. Mike, Brian and I met at the marina at 7 am, loaded our gear onto the boat and then jumped into Brian's Durango for a quick run to the local bait and tackle shop. The owners of the shop seemed genuinely excited when we came in and asked "Where's the Stripers?" and they were very accommodating with good information. They told us what to use, how to use it and exactly where we'd find them. I didn't think much about it at the time, but we would be heading out of Fire Island inlet, into the Atlantic and about 5-7 miles east along the south shore. We were told to "hang on" because we were gonna be into some "serious bass!" "The Blues are gone, it's all Stripers out there now!" Needless to say, I left there guardedly optimistic. I've heard that kind of big talk before from bait shops and party boat captains only to be highly disappointed when the predicted heroics don't quite line up with the actual results.

We got to the boat and headed out. As we cruised through the bay, the water was mostly flat with just a bit of a ripple from a light wind. Mike and I started to get all our gear setup while we were cruising out, but once completed, we moved up into the cabin alongside our captain and the three of us chatted while admiring the sights around the bay. Brian's boat is not really built for fishing, but it's a pretty sweet ride and certainly more than capable of getting us out to the fish. What could be better? Nice day, nice boat, good friends, good laughs, and good fishing to come...it was all going perfectly...until....

We came out of the mouth of Fire Island inlet to a bit of an unnerving sight. At the point where the bay met the Atlantic, angry looking swells rolled nastily as far as I could see and the suddenly gusty wind blew small whitecaps off some of the bigger waves.

Brian charged the boat without hesitation right into the waves as I grabbed onto anything I could find. The big 32-footer literally flew off the top of each wave, the twin 250 hp inboards actually coming out of the water sometimes and then crashing down heavily into each successive trough. It only took about a half dozen "launches" before the little door separating the cabin from the bow came swinging open and then smashing closed again breaking the tongue off the latch that is supposed to hold it closed. The door swung back and forth, opened and closed for about 3 or 4 more times before I yelled over to Brian, "Hey is this boat made to be able to withstand this kind of punishment??" I was admittedly a bit worried already...I couldn't imagine it would be too healthy to just pound our way across 5+ miles of open water at this pace, but hey, what do I know? I'm just a kayaker from CT! Brian admitted that he doesn't come out to challenge the ocean much with the family, but he agreed we should probably slow down a bit. So we dropped our speed from about 17 mph down to about 5. If we were gonna make it to our planned fishing destination, this was gonna be a long trip!

As we road up, and down, and up, and down, and up, and down these blue-green beasts that started to look every bit of 5-6 feet tall, I suddenly felt a new kind of worry...in my stomach...

Yep...this was gonna get interesting...

More to come...

Schoolies on the Housie

Well my first fishing post will be chronicling a great day on the Housatonic River. My kayak fishing buddy George and I met at Short Beach in Stratford right around 11:15am yesterday. It was our first day on the river since the spring when the striper fishing started to thin out as the water warmed up. We got the yaks loaded up and carried them the 50 or 60 yards to water just an hour past high tide. We had a minor miscue before we got started when George accidentally bumped my camera walking by my yak. For some reason it was enough to strip the threads on the mount rendering it useless for this trip. Oh well, I was gonna have to take photos the old-fashioned way.

Camera issues became a distant memory when we reached the edge of the sharp drop off to the channel of the river and my little Humminbird lit up over a good sized school of bass. My very first cast was rewarded with that old familiar thump at the other end of my 10lb braided line when a 15" striper inhaled the offering. "Fish!" I yelled out. George responded with a resounding, "Alright!" My first 4 casts yielded 3 schoolie bass. The 3rd of those ended up being my biggest fish of the day a 20-21" bass that thought he was a monster. Fishing a light freshwater rod and reel, anything 20" or more can put up a nice fight and this little "tough guy" made me work a little. George also hooked up quickly, and only 15 minutes in, we'd landed a half dozen between us. What a great start!

By now, we found ourselves heading pretty quickly down river in the heavy outgoing flow and we stopped to paddle our way back upstream. George stopped to make a few more drifts over the same area, but I decided to make my way up to the rock and concrete marker at the entrance to the mouth of the river. I pulled up behind the rocks and stretched out a leg to hold myself up against the structure and stay protected from the current. Immediately, I hooked up with another bass and decided to get my first photo of the little guy.

Somehow, as I took this photo, my sunglasses quietly
slipped into the river, never to be seen again...

After George made his way up and we caught a couple more each, we decided to journey a little farther upstream as a number of boats were anchored up and fishing about a quarter mile to our north. It was a tough paddle against the current and we spent an hour plus up there. George got into a good pod of fish while I pulled over to the shore to have a bite to eat, but the action was a little slow overall, so we decided to head back downstream again. We drifted down and back through the mouth all the way out to the end of the breakwall, but no fish.

George recalled a day years back when he caught his biggest striper ever, a 36-pounder, out in front of the old gun club on the Stratford side. So we paddled all the way across the choppy seas to the other side, but found no action there either, and as the tide started to turn around and move back in, we started our long paddle back up as well.

After a stop for a leg-stretch on one of the huge sand bars now forcing it's way out into what was once a solid sea of water only hours earlier, we made an extremely arduous paddle up to right around our original launch point. As we came up on row of about a dozen or so anglers up to their waists off the edge of the sand bar slinging flies and other various offerings, we crossed the still fleet current to a huge sand bar on the Milford side of the river, beached the yaks and started flinging our Zoom fluke jigs from there. On the first 3 casts George caught fish. Finally, I hooked up too and we had a blast for another 45 minutes as the sun set in the west and a full moon rose up at our backs.

As darkness started setting in, we got back in the kayaks and began to work the main channel again each landing a few more fish.

Soon the wind started to pick up strongly, and along with the incoming tide we were being pushed up river. At about 5:30, the wind and the dropping temperatures were becoming a little too much to fight, so we started back to our launch point. Little did we know how much work it was going to be to get back to our vehicles. The tide was still so low that we had to get out and push, pull and tow our yaks through about 6 inches of water for 150 yards and then carry them about another 75 yards to our cars. It was quite a workout to end the day, but the effort was worth it. It was great to get out there and get after 'em again.

Jeff

Let's just get started somewhere...

I'm not yet sure what my compulsion is to share about it and I'm not even sure what the appropriate medium is to share about it, but let's at least get started...somewhere...

So here is my first blog:

My name is Jeff, and I live in southern CT. And like many other anglers out there, I have a bit of an obsession with a species of fish known as the Striped Bass.

"Yea, so what?" one might ask.

Well, I spend countless hours reading other people's blogs, striper fishing forums, northeast area fishing magazines, how-to books, etc. on how to, where to, and when to, catch these creatures, but so far, in my now two plus years of fishing for them, I have had, what most would consider very limited success. I currently have 3 "keepers" to my striper fishing career credits; two 28" fish caught in 2012, and a 31" caught in March of 2013.

Here's my first ever keeper:

In my time reading all this material on striper fishing, I have found that most folks posting stuff are fairly successful at it. I especially enjoy those posts that might be titled something like, "Got the wife out on the boat for the first time in 3 years..." which many times include a photo of "the Mrs." with a nice 25-pounder. Dang....

Well, first of all, for me, this is real weekend warrior stuff. There is a constant tug-of-war going on between my daily 150-mile round-trip commute to work in NJ (maybe a story for another day), my love of my wife and two teenage daughters, and my love of fishing, especially for stripers. A couple weeks ago, as I was negotiating with my wife for some time on the water, she said that she would be happy if I spent half as much time thinking about how I was going to spend time with her as I did thinking about where and when I was going to get my next fishing fix. Bottom line is I don't get to fish nearly as much as I would like to.

Secondly, this is more of a "fishing on a budget" pursuit. I don't have a boat and I'm not sure if, or when, I ever will. It sure seems like a there's a lot of extra time and $$ that goes into owning a boat. No, my vehicle of choice is a Wilderness Systems Tarpon 120 kayak, or from time-to-time, someone else's boat. My nephew Paulie has a nice new Triton bass boat that I look forward to getting out on with him soon for instance.

So, I'm after big game, but on a smallish budget and on a severely constrained time schedule. When I'm out there, it needs to count because I may not get out there again for weeks. Finding the right time is an enormous challenge when you are generally limited to Saturdays or Sundays. For some reason, the weather does not want to be perfectly kayak-fisherman-friendly every weekend when I'm actually available to fish....

So this blog will channel my thoughts in my pursuit of that elusive "cow" striper. I have much I'd like to share and I certainly can't squeeze it all into this first post, so I will do my best to sprinkle my thoughts and anecdotes along the way. Hopefully there'll be a few of you out there that'll find it interesting and even humorous at times. Believe me, my fishing prowess can sometimes be more like a perpetual "amateur hour" than anything else you'll read out there.

Enjoy - Jeff