A Wild (and Frustrating) Night

I went out last night in one of my favorite spots in the Bay where the water really moves on the outgoing tide. When I arrived at about 7 PM the high tide was barely trickling seaward. Suddenly, at about 7:30 the tide really started moving and that's when all hell broke loose. In the current were loads of grass shrimp skipping and hopping on the surface in the outgoing water. Stripers and blues went on a frenzy targeting every shrimp they could find. Some fish were just rod's length away in a few feet of water. Most of the time I had at least 4 to 5 jumps to cast to. This went on for over an hour. Unfortunately, the fish were not in a hitting mood since nothing I could snap on could come close to matching the hatch that the fish wanted. I tried all the usual small stuff.....small jigs (plastic and bucktail), shrimp fly teasers, Deceiver teasers, plastic on top, very small poppers, small swimmers, etc. Nothing really worked well. I did manage to catch 6 schoolies and 2 bluefish which mostly hit at and after dark after a lot of the activity had subsided. While the fish were busting all over the place, I could only lure the 2 blues to a small Zoom fluke fished on top. It all just goes to show how difficult it can be to fool finicky stripers and bluefish when they are targeting small bait.