On Saturday September 20, 2014, I set out to Handkerchief Shoals with my mate Kevin Spear to go see about some striped bass. Armed with live eels, we arrived early in the morning, right after the tide changed and we got right into the fishing. By mid-morning we were marking big piles of stripers on the sonar and they were picking up our eels but as luck would have it, we couldn’t manage to hold on to the fish. We even lost one boat side. At one point it seemed like every boat around us was hooked up and doubled up. It was extremely frustrating to be in that situation. We kept fishing until the current died and only managed one blue fish.
We headed back toward the Bass River and stopped just outside the mouth and broke out the fluke gear. We made 5 or 6 drifts and picked up one keeper sized fluke and many short sea bass. We have been fishing that spot only 1.5 miles outside the river all summer and have done well with the fluke so I was actually happy to still see some life there this late in the season.
On Sunday Sept 21st, I convinced my good friend Paul Spear of Sea Dog Fishing Charters to go back to Handkerchief Shoal for stripers. The forecast wasn’t great but the weather actually held out until about 1pm before the fog took over. I loaded up with live eels again but once we arrived Paul suggested we put out the tube and worm gear until the current picked up a bit more and until we were marking fish. Well good idea, because we started hammering stripers while every boat near us that was using live eels couldn’t catch a thing. One other boat out there was snapping wire line and they were picking up stripers too.
By late morning, we came upon a bunch of birds crashing the surface on bait and Kevin Spear threw out a standard epoxy jig and hooked into a nice albie. A school of albies surfaced right beside the boat! It was a nice treat to see that. They disappeared as fast as they showed up.
In the end we ended up with 6 stripers ranging in size from 37-42 inches, a blue fish and an albie. It felt good to the get some stripers on day two after getting skunked the day before and it was also nice to adapt to a different fishing style that worked that day.
