Who Turned Off The Heat?
It finally feels like autumn, which is kicking things into gear. We’ve got some shop news and then a quick fishing report.
If you haven’t at some point thrown a Charlie Graves Tin, can you call yourself a surfcaster? These classic lures have been around for ages, and for good reason. They flat out catch fish. We have restocked on all the style we carried previously, plus added 4 new models, the J2, J3, J4 and J6 tins. These swim well with both a fast retrieve as well as the slow retrieve that big, lazy striped bass prefer.
Another classic we added was the Gibbs Danny Deep Diver. Some anglers refer to these plugs as “trollers” and, while they are not wrong, these plugs are much more. The plugs can be attached to the end of a wire line and trolled at depths down to around 25 to 30 feet. They can also be trolled behind a boat or kayak without wire and will dive down around 6 feet. There are also places the shore bound anger will find these useful. The cut of the nose helps the plug handle rough water and strong current, so anglers fishing deep inlets, canals and breachways will enjoy these lures.
We received another shipment of Bill Hurley lures, so we have restocked a number of lures that sold out from the last shipment. We also have something new, a new color for the 7 inch paddletail sand eel. It’s called “Green Pepper” and has a bit of that “block island green” hue to it, but also has black flakes in the mix, so it could very well pass as a small tinker mackerel.
We also received a large shipment of 701L blanks from Black Hole USA. These make great spinning rods for tog jigging (Ray was getting a little drooley looking at them). They also make a nice fluke rod as a conventional, or even a nice light tackle rod for back bay or off a boat. If you want to build one, come get a blank. And for those of you who don’t want to build a rod, come see Blackcloud Bob and have him build one for you.
With the weather getting cooler the bass have made their presence known in the surf. We had a number of anglers stop in to let us know they had great fishing for striped bass in the twilight hours of the morning. The best report was 11 bass to 28.5 inches. Others caught anywhere from 1 to 8 fish before the rising sun shut it down. Lures of choice were SP Minnows, smaller Vudu Shads, and Bomber Long-A Minnows.
The trick to finding these fish, do NOT target the bunker schools. These schoolie bass are eating something other than the adult bunker that are all over the place up and down the coast. There is plenty of other bait; rainfish, spearing, and some straggler mullet schools are probably their targets. Also, with the drop in air temperature, the backwaters should start getting colder, pushing out the tons of peanut bunker that can be found there. Things could get interesting soon.
Ray looking at the 701L banks…
