One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing people refer to big striped bass as “lazy.” Wild animals, especially those living in the ocean, are not afforded the luxury of laziness. If they were lazy, they’d either be eaten or starve to death. Those big “lazy” stripers carefully calculate each movement, so as not to expend more energy than they could reasonably get back by consuming any available forage. While a big bass shadowing a school of bluefish and picking up the scraps could easily be misconstrued as laziness, it is in fact, efficiency. Those bass are getting an easy meal while the bluefish do all the work. Behavior like that is what allows them to become such big bass.
But watch a 40-pound striper smash up the surface chasing down a mackerel skipping across the top of the canal or a bunker fleeing for its life off the Jersey jetties, and “lazy” will be one of the last words that comes to mind.
Though we posted this video a couple months ago, here’s a quick clip of some of those lazy 40-pounders chasing down some adult bunker (video by Tom Lynch, angryfish.tv)
I love that video. The best part is the guys standing on the jetty with their backs to the blitz, no clue what is going on behind them.