Planning ahead, but also using all your resources and being flexible, is what makes the search for stripers so much fun. Weather reports, high and low tide times, sunrise or sunset, mid-day or mid-night, moon phases, water temperature, where to fish, the cost of gas, steel or fluorocarbon leaders, bait or lures, how did my fishing buddies make out over the past few days and how have I made out myself. These are just some of the things I consider when I am mapping out my daily plans for searching out saltwater stripers in my home waters of the Western Long Island Sound. I also keep a detailed fishing log so I can look back over my past few years of fishing to make it easier identifying patterns with tides, water temperatures, bait runs, etc.
Weather Reports
These are important for safety of course, but they also let me know quite a few other important things as well. If the wind is blowing hard in any direction, my hopes of spotting bait at the surface by site are very low so I will need to depend on my fish-finder a lot more to try and find pods of bait that are not showing on the surface due to the rough conditions. I’ll also need to decide if I want to bring along some frozen bait just in case there is no bait to be found at all. The direction the wind is blowing is also important. If the wind is blowing from the land onto the water near my homeport, then I know I can tuck in close to shore along the mouth of my harbor where the wind and waves will not be too bad. On the other hand, if the wind is blowing off the water towards my home port, then I’m in for a sloppy day no matter where I decide to fish since the wind builds up the waves as it comes across the water so the shoreline outside my area harbors will be whipped up quite a bit. On those days I like to duck into some of my favorite hot spots inside the rivers, harbors and break walls along the New York / Connecticut border. Read the rest of this informative article from Richard DeMarte on the Striper 247 website….
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