Seahawk - Keyport, Report 11/16 Striper Mayhem

[Chrisper4694]

As the holidays come closer, children may be starting to have visions of sugar plums but we are having visions of seagulls and slapping stripers!

The day started off quick with two short stripers (about 20") coming up on the umbrella troll. Then our umbrella shads started coming up halved and with some pretty nice bluefish attached to it. We had a hit once that I almost couldn't pull out of the holder it was so heavy, i though it was a monster but it got lighter as i reeled in and it had one nice blue and two missing shads...so we switched over to a more bluefish friendly rig and nothing would touch it!

We did some exploring and scanning but couldn't really find much but a lone blue or short striper for a long time. Then the captain saw something in the distance...tons of birds swarming the bay! we pulled everything up and zoomed to the area.

Birds everywhere gorging themselves and sitting, not because the frenzy was over, but because they were stuffed and exhausted; bass churning, busting, and slapping the surface literally for a 100 yards in every direction. We immediately grabbed our poppers and went to work on these fish. every other cast got slapped or smashed. stripers were knocked the poppers out of the water!

At first they were all shorts about 20-25" fish, but they were aggressive as anything i've ever seen pulling drag out of my reel with ease at times. As far as we could tell, there were no blues in the mix either. We were having so much fun we didn't even care that they were all shorts. But then we realized keeper sized fish were hanging around the outskirts of the mass and then it was really game on!

After about 3 hours of non-stop action we boated about 20 fish between the two of us, got hit probably another 50 times without hooking up as well as lost a couple here and there and i broke off two lures with nice fish hooked up (i think because the lure fouled itself and snapped when the fish pulled.

4 keepers, biggest was 31.5" at 11lbs. The closer it got to high tide peak the more picky they became; first blasting aggressive poppers and then shying away from that we had to switch to subsurface lures to get some bigger fish. Most fun we've had all season!

[Gerry Zagorski]

Great report. Got to love casting to these fish with top waters. My favorite way to fish for them.

[Chrisper4694]

hands down! no one can argue with that! it's the best though when top water is also the most effective way to get them and that's what it was at first till we had to throw sub surface to get fast action again as it got closer to peak tide.

the one picture i posted was blurry, here is the better one we took in focus.