StripersOnline.com - Surf Fishing Striped Bass Archives

Changing times...I hope we can change 'em back!
August 6, 2001:

Well, there was a glimmer of hope a few trips ago...but reality was promptly slammed back home just a couple days later. Seems BrianZ and myself ran into some fish....not a lot...even just 2 years ago it would have probably been a below average plugging trip for early August. But landing 6 fish to around 15-16#'s this season...geesh, I waited all the next day for someone to come interview me...I was sure I'd be famous! We plugged for a few hours and had some bites...they weren't gimmes...we worked for the bites...but it was an odd feeling of confidence that there just might be fish looking at your plugs as you worked them through the swells. That "odd" feeling used to be attached to every single cast. It was truly strange to cast and expect to get a hit! Just a few years ago, things were completely reversed...it was extremely rare that I would throw a cast and not expect to get a hit. No, I didn't get hits every cast...but the confidence of knowing that fish were at least looking at my plugs left me expecting a hit every cast...and it did happen sometimes...even in July and August I'm still not sure why there are folks on SurfTalk that claim that I am "making up this crisis"...I am, as I always have, just reporting the very things that I see while fishing. That's what I've done since starting this site...and that's what I'll continue to do. Can you imagine what kind of warped mind it would take to even suggest that I'm making up these continued poor fishing reports? I mean, come on folks, I'd much rather be spreading stories of great fish in respectable numbers. I'd rather have this page full of all the outstanding fishing trips I've been on lately...but I'd rather not have to make them up. If the fishing's poor, I'll tell ya...if it's great, I'll tell ya...but I ain't adding fluff one way or the other, I'll tell ya like it is Right now...and for the past 8 weeks, it's been dismal. It's been non existent. One night of plugging w/ BrianZ and I got 6 fish...and I felt like a folk hero...any July/August from more than 3 years ago, 6 fish would have been way below average. I'm not making this stuff up...I got witnesses

We're theoretically over the hump as far as the season goes...sometime right around the end of this month and the beginning of September, we should start to see more fish as the mullet start making their way outta the rivers. And the peanut bunker should be showing up in the surf in good numbers almost as we speak. This is in theory of course...the reports of fewer and smaller fish north of us don't give me all that much hope. We will see some fish and we will see (hopefully) some big fish...but if this fall follow the recent fall patterns, we won't see too many and it won't last too long. But I'm ever optimistic. I'm hoping that I'm way off base and we see many, many fish for many, many weeks..and with a decent number of big fish mixed in. Pipe dream for the most part, but I'll always remain hopeful that we are not killing as many fish as all the data shows that we are. Cross yer fingers!

I'm gonna keep this page short today in hopes that I can get back to it on a more frequent basis! I do have lots more to say, I'll try to spread it out a little better than in recent months