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North of Portland 2018

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My Striped Bass season started off today with me catching (and releasing) 32 fish with most of them measuring 18 inches and over. I was using my usual modus operandi of towing tube and worm rigs through the skinny water with my kayak. I caught surprisingly few of the smaller fish that we saw last year. The second fish of the morning measured 32 inches and, I picked up another striper about 20 minutes later that measured 30 inches. I probably could have caught a lot more than 32 fish this morning, but I promised the activity coordinator (wife) that I would be home for lunch, so I only fished four hours. I was still catching fish when I headed to my kayak take out point, located a half a mile away, catching decent sized fish all the way there.

Edited by Crozzbow

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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Wow, I can only hope to find areas as productive as that. I am a bit south of you on the NH/ME border and I've caught far fewer fish but the smallest so far was still a little over 20." Only had a chance to get out in the yak once after the stripers arrived and while I didn't catch those types of numbers there weren't any micros.  It's been a great season so far!

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My second outing of the season ended today with me catching (and releasing) another 30 plus fish. Unfortunately, most of them measured 18 inches and below. While I essentially followed the same game plan as Thursday, the results turned out to be somewhat different. The bigger fish decided they were going to be really shy today with only a handful of 18 to 27 inch fish hitting my tube and worm rigs.  Most of those hits came during my first hour and a half that I was on the water when the sky was still dark. I intended to spend more time on the water today but the wind and waves were really picking up around 10 am so I called it a day.

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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I caught (and released) seven ultra feisty striped bass this morning from the beach using my 9 weight fly rod.and a really beat up olive and white clouser minnow fly. The fly is a carry over from last year that always caught fish for me. I thought I would give it one more shot.before I retired it.

 

I had all intentions of being on the beach early enough to start fishing at first light. However,that didn't work very well as I fell promptly back to sleep after shutting down the alarm clock. It didn't really matter all that much because I still caught fish. Including my first catch of the day (20 plus inches in length) which was caught on my first cast of the day. That's something I haven't done all that often.

 

As it was, I ended up fishing approximately a little over an hour on both sides of this mornings low tide. Five fish were caught during the last of the drop, one fish caught during the slack, and one fish during the first of the rising tide.

 

I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow morning. Of course,That assumes I can drag my sorry arse out of bed, 

Edited by Crozzbow

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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Crozzbow I’ve really enjoyed ur reports the last couple of years I’ve been on this site.  I was just curious, have you done any of your kayak trips at night? It would be really interesting to troll an eel at night in the areas you troll worms during the day.

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1 hour ago, Bmackerel said:

have you done any of your kayak trips at night?

Nope !!!

Not sure I want to either.

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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22 hours ago, Crozzbow said:

 

I'm going to give it another shot tomorrow morning. Of course,That assumes I can drag my sorry arse out of bed,

It was touch and go but I managed to crawl out of bed this morning in time to get to the beach and start fishing at first light.

For my troubles, I had the opportunity to battle six more of those ultra feisty fish that I described yesterday.

Most of the actual fishing activity was fairly similar to yesterday. The major exception being that I only fished the last two hours of the dropping tide this morning, I also spent a little bit of my time helping a recent acquaintance catch his first two striped bass on a fly rod. 

From my perspective it was one of those successful and enjoyable mornings that are worth getting out of bed for.

 

Edited by Crozzbow

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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I launch the kayak at 5:00 am this morning and it was non-stop action for the next four hours. By the time I finally called it a day at 9:00 am, I had caught (and released) just a little shy of fifty fish. I wasn’t all that hard either as I was finding fish every where I looked and they were readily taking the tube and worm rigs that I was offering them. the fish cruising the shorelines, hovering over submerged sandbars, ledges, weed-beds and chasing bait all over the shallow water mud flats I was on. I did not catch many fish over twenty inches in length, However, every once in a while, a big fish would come out of no where to slam one of my tube and worm offerings when I wasn’t paying enough attention. The smaller fish would also get in on some that action by teaming up and simultaneously hitting bot of my tube and worm rigs at the same time. Both tactics tended to make my heart skip a beat of two when they were properly employed by those finny bass-turds.

 

Took some pics for no other reason than I just happened to find a camera that I thought had been lost to me forever. The last pic show one of the  seven fish I caught (and released) today that had a broken stripe pattern.

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Edited by Crozzbow

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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When I got up this morning I fully intended to return to the same fishing locations that treated me so well on Wednesday morning. However, I thought about it some more while the coffee was brewing and decided the fishing had been way to easy on Wednesday and I wanted to fish in a location that might offer a bit more of a challenge. The location I chose was a secluded cove that an out of state SOL member introduced me to last summer. I had only fished it once out of a power boat and I was super curious in knowing if towing tube and worm rigs with my kayak would work in that cove. And,they did! After four hours of fishing my tally was 43 fish caught and released. Most of the fish were 15 to 19 inches in length and caught in water between two to five feet deep.

The action was virtually non-stop with multiple hook ups occurring within the same general locations in the cove. One of those locations led to a somewhat humorous moment between me and one of the coves camp owners. I had been fishing out in front of his dock for about twenty minutes when he came down to the dock to check me out. When I told him that I had been catching fish in that area for the last twenty minutes he seemed a bit dubious. He told me that for the last week and a half he had fished every day off that dock with only a couple of small fish for his effort.  When I informed him that I had already picked up twelve fish in the same water he all but called me a liar.  With almost perfect timing a fish slammed one of my tube and worm rigs. While I was wrestling that fish in another one hit my other tube and worm rig. The camp owner just stared at me for a few minutes, said some real nasty words to no one in particular, then he asked me if it was possible to cast tube and worm rigs. I started to laugh before I realized that he was dead serious. I told him that it was possible but since I never tried casting a tube and worm rig I couldn’t vouch for how well it would work. From there I said my goodbyes and started to move off. Two paddle strokes later I was into another fish.  I didn't look back but as I quickly moved away fom his dock I kept imagining what it must feel like when an SP Minnow slams you in the back of the head.

Edited by Crozzbow

While the prospect of catching fish isn’t the only reason I love being on the water, it is one of the best excuses I have for continuing to go there.

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1 hour ago, Crozzbow said:

I didn't look back but as I quickly moved away fom his dock I kept imagining what it must feel like when an SP Minnow slams you in the back of the head.

If it was me, I'd bop you with a pogie snag treble!!  ;-)

Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing? - H. D. Thoreau

 

Veni.  Vidi.  Cepi. - with apologies to Gaius Julius Caesar

 

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