Warm Water, Small Bait and Fussy Stripers

The egg float with a deceiver fly was the only
thing that would catch the fussy schoolies
in the last two days.

I've found lots of stripers in the last two days. Problem is that I caught very few. The fish I found were all good size schoolies, and they were on very tiny bait and lots of it.  The bait looked like mini peanut bunker about half an inch long. Schoolies were breaking all over the place for this bait. There were times when individual fish were busting here and there.  There were also times when schools of 50 to 100 fish were breaking after bigger pods of bait. While I found big numbers of fish, the common theme today was that these fish were super fussy.

The first day I fished I caught nothing.  I tried everything in my bag. The usual bucktail jigs, Cochahoes, small swimmers and Jumpin Minnows. Nothing worked. I wished I has some small metal, but that was all at home in my "albie bag".

This is one of several hefty schoolies
landed on the float and fly today.

The second day I fished I went back to the same location with the bag of metal. Loaded again with breaking fish.  This time I went through all the usual stuff and even the metal. No takers. Then I remembered I had a few float and fly rigs in my bag.  That is a killer for fussy albies so why not stripers. After a few casts, I threw the rig into a mass of breaking fish and got one to take. It was a decent schoolie of about 24 inches.  I made a lot more casts into pods of breaking fish and came away with two more schoolies.  Yup, not exactly killing it, but it did work with limited success, more than I can say for the day before.

When I got home, I found my Fisherman magazine in the mail.  In it I had a story called "Peanut Bunker Explosion." It talks about fishing for stripers and blues in the early going when the first masses of peanut bunker arrive in early August and how the fish can be very fussy due to warm water and small bait. Well, I was living that story the last two days. 

Nothing in fishing is a sure bet. I would like to think I "cracked the code" on catching these fussy fish, but I also know that if I hit this spot tomorrow it could all be a totally different ballgame.