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