I've had my best three days in a row of fishing that I've had in months here in RI. I found big amounts of bait in both the Bay and along the oceanfront, and it delivered big numbers of stripers, blues, fluke and black sea bass.Several days ago I went back to fishing in the Bay. To my surprise, I found big schools of peanut bunker in the area I was fishing from shore. It didn't take long the find the stripers and bluefish as I started getting fish after fish on Zoom flukes mounted on jigheads. Towards dark, fish started breaking all over the place. While these were all schoolies and smaller blues, they were great on the light tackle I was using. Hey, it's the end of July and I'll settle for anything. By the way, this is very early for peanut bunker, and a real good sign of what's to come.
I went back to this spot again last night and once again, fish all over the place with a mix of stripers and blues. Same deal, fish breaking all over the place at sunset. I got good numbers of fish on jigs.
Today, my brother and I decided to hit the oceanfront from the boat. We found big amounts of bait that looked like bay anchovies. We began our day by catching good numbers of fluke up to keeper size along with a number of black sea bass. We got those vertical jigging bucktails. While doing this, we suddenly ran into an area of schools of breaking fish and diving birds. It turned out to be schools of both stripers and bluefish attacking the schools of bay anchovies. These were like wild October blitzes with big schools of fish feeding on the surface. It went on for hours. The stripers were good size schoolies in the 20 to 25 inch range. The blues went 4 to 7 lbs. All the action was on topwater plugs with the Rebel Jumpin Minnow being the hottest plug.It's the end of July, but suddenly, the fishing has a fall feel to it. That's what bait can do, and we have it right now. The RI fishing has awoken from the summer doldrums!
