Striped Bass Fishing Tips:

We usually start out our season in western Raritan Bay clamming for spring Stripers around mid April and then as soon as the bunker arrive, we will switch over to chunking. Chunking bunker is a great way to catch larger Stripers. In the fall, we fish for Stripers drifting eels as bait or jigging while fishing areas such as the "Rip" at the tip of Sandy Hook, Sandy Hook and Ambrose Channel's and other "striper hangouts" stored on my GPS. Our first priority is bait fishing for our catch, but if we see that the Stripers are responding to casting "plug" type lures, then game on! Surface and subsurface type cruiser artificial's as well as poppers cast on light spinning outfits are a real blast for novice as well as experienced anglers. On occasion, we will troll Strectch 25's and Tube & Worm rigs in order to put a catch in the box if all else fails, but as you can see, we're really not big on trolling.

Tips:

1 - "Clamming" is very successful way to catch Stripers. A bushel bag or two of "sea clams" is usually enough for our 4 man charters. Anchor up around clam beds or wherever you "mark" fish and chum using cracked clams as bait. Put 4 - 5 clams in a bucket and break them up with a hard object (baseball bat) and then add some sea water to make a soupy mixture. Then disperse this mixture in the water around the boat....works great. Shuck another clam for your hooks making sure you impale the clam on the hook securely through the belly first and then through the tongue of the clam. We make it a habit of using 24" long leaders with a fishfinder rig and cast the clam bait away from the stern of the boat and fish our reels in "free spool" and the clicker on until pickup. DON"T set the hook in the normal way with circle hooks, just lock the reel. We use 6/0-9/0 circle hooks exclusively......more hookups, and less wasted fish.

Good areas to fish are around ocean and bay clam beds, Romer Shoal, Flynn's Knoll, the Rockaway's in New York, and around the "Round Shoal " area back in Raritan Bay for early season Stripers to name a few.

2 - "Chunking" To catch the really BIG Stripers, our bait of choice are "bunker heads", using the remainder of the fish cut into small chunks for chunking. Discard the tails! To catch "fresh" bunker, our most effective way is to throw a cast net. Our 10' Calusa net sinks really fast. One good cast and you have enough bunker for a full days trip and more. We will also cast a weighted treble hook and "snag" bunker too. We like to hook the bait (head) through the gill plate so that the head lays facing an oncoming Striper. Remember, Stripers swallow the head first as they don't have teeth and can swallow the head for an easy pickup. We use a 24" long 30# flourocarbon leader tied to a 6/0 to 9/0 circle hook on a fishfinder rig and cast the head away from the stern of the boat and fish our reels in "free spool" and the clicker on until pickup.

3 -Trolling Stretch 25's- Trolling Mann's Stretch 25 deep diving lure products on braided line can be very successful if you use some common sense and some very easy techniques. It might take you a few trips to get the hang of it, but learning this technique will pay off big in the end.

First offl, I like using med-heavy 8 - 9' rods that have a moderate taper. Couple that with a conventional level wind reel (Penn's 320 GT's) but the choice of reel is up to you. If you are trolling braid lines, like we do, you can use level wind reels, which is a no-no when trolling wire line and bunker spoons. There are numerous makers of really good level wind reels that you have available to you in whatever price range to fit your budget.

We load our reels with about 1/4 spool of dacron backing, then we fill the remainder of our reel with 40 lb braid line. Once again, the choice of braid is up to you, but I really like the Suffix or Power Pro products as they are a very supple braid. At the end of your braid, add a good high quality barrel swivel (I love the 80-100 lb. Tsunami Pro) and then attach about a 6-8 ft. shot of 40-50 lb. flurocarbon leader tied to another high quality snap swivel. Now attach your Stretch 25 to your snap swivel and you're ready to go.

Trolling speeds are crucial to success as anyone who trolls bunker spoons will tell you. I've found that a good speed for my boat is around 3 kts. You know that your lure is doing its thing when your rod tip is pulsating rapidly (you won't see the slower pulsation that a bunker spoon gives you). Drop the lure into the water and feed out enough line until you just start to dig into the sandy bottom and then crank in 5-6 turns of the reel. You should be trolling in 25-30 feet of water and NO MORE! Remember.....BIG Stripers feed almost exclusively within 5' of the bottom. (If you want proof of this, get you hands on the video "Stripers Gone Wild" and then you'll know why) If you decide that you want to troll Stretch 25's in deeper water you can always add an egg sinker to the braid line just before the barrel swivel to get it down deeper. A 2, 3,or 4 oz. egg sinker will work wonders getting that lure to the depth you want. I've had better success trolling "with the current" than against it. But that's me, so experiment and see what works for you.

Good areas to troll are along Raritan Reach, Great Kills Bug Light area, 11A, 20A, Old Orchard Lighthouse, and the "Round Shoal" area in western Raritan Bay to name a few.

3 -Trolling "Tube and Worm" technique -Although the "Tube and Worm" technique of trolling has been used for years by charter fisherman to the north of us, I admit I have been very slow to adapt this process on my boat. But, in 2012 that will all change. I saw first hand what an effective way of fishing this was during a recent trip to Block Island and Martha's Vineyard. What I liked about it was that it was just as successful using braid line, which I really like for trolling, as well as trolling wire line.

I admit, I'm not a big fan of any kind of trolling, but when push comes to shove and I need to produce fish on a day when bait is not working, we will get out the trolling rods. I like to have everyone involved in fishing holding a rod and working the bait and not sitting and watching trolling rods go off. But, to insure that we make every effort to put some fish in the box, I will revert to trolling if I have to. Trolling "Tube and Worm" was very, very successful for me up north, so let's see this spring how it'll work down here.

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Fluke Fishing Tips:

Places to fish: Sandy Hook Channel, Ambrose Channel, Raritan Reach Channel, Chapel Hill Channel,
Sandy Hook Reef, the Rattlesnake, Breezy Point, the ledge along Officer's Row, TC Buoy, SP Buoy and
the Sandy Hook Bug Light drop-off to name a few.........remember STRUCTURE!!!!

Tips:
Drift for Fluke and keep the baits moving. Speed of your drift is CRUCIAL, so a speed of between 1 - 1.5 kts is best or my anglers. Anything less and you're in trouble (try power drifting) as well as as anything more and it's time to get the drift sock out and slow yourself down. We use and highly reccommend the Cabela's 72" Dia Pro Drift Sock for boats in the 25' range that will slow our drift down by more than a knot. A must have tool if you're serious about catching Fluke. My choice of baits are squid strip/Peruvian smelt combo, strips of bunker, strips of sea robbin, strips of bluefish or strips of mackeral. Targeting larger Fluke like we do, we'll use long strips or even whole small squid as bait in deep channel areas such as Sandy Hook and Ambrose Channels. Bucktail jigs with strips can be deadly...... rigged along with a Clouser or Deceiver teaser a foot above the bucktail on the same line. A "killer" bucktail is the 4 or 6 oz Spro in Glow and Chartruese/White fished with a strip of bait of your choice (especially sea robbin strips).........absolutely deadly!!!

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