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| Ben Pickering holds a schoolie landed after dark. The hot action continued into darkness. |
For me, it has been one blitz after another for the
month of October thus far. Striper fishing this month has been phenomenal here in RI. But, the blitz I hit today was probably the biggest I've seen this year.
My son so Ben and I hit the RI beachfront this afternoon and we walked into a miles long blitz of stripers, some blues and hickory shad tearing through massive schools of bay anchovies that were being driven right onto the sand. At times, the water was boiling in front of us with breaking fish going nuts on small bait. At one point I was standing in knee deep water with feeding stripers all around me.
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| While most of the bass were schoolies, there were some small keepers in the mix. |
We weren't alone. No exaggeration, I saw hundred of guys that looked like a winding picket fence of casters all along the shoreline. And, it seemed like everyone was catching from kids to fly fishermen to serious well equipped diehards.
I will tell you these fish on small bait were fussy. I got some on bucktail jigs and some on Cocahoes on jigheads, but my best producer was a float and fly, the same setup I use for albies. The fly, a homemade pink Deceiver, was the silver bullet. It got me the most fish and the biggest. After dark, landed good numbers of fish on a white Slug-Go.
Most of the fish we landed were schoolies in the 22 to 26 inch range but I'm willing to bet we had a couple of 28 inch keepers in the mix. We lost count of the numbers of fish we caught.
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| Masses of stripers are feeding on huge schools of bay anchovies today. |
