Snowflake Stripers

Holdovers, residents, whatever you call them, there are striped bass that stay in local waters year-round, regardless of your latitude. As long as the salt or brackish water in your region doesn’t completely freeze over, you can catch stripers right through the winter.

Holdover striper fishing is a far cry from the fishing of spring, summer and fall. The fish are smaller and less plentiful, the weather is cold (often miserably so), and the techniques required to catch them are usually painfully boring. So, why bother with winter striper fishing at all? Because four months is too long to go without catching a striped bass.

The first thing to consider when seeking winter stripers is location. Schools of them often spend the winter in the upper reaches of bays or rivers. In some cases, stripers will move into fresh water.

In the cold waters of winter, stripers don’t move very much and feed infrequently, but they do feed. They form dense schools, so fishermen are best served by covering water with artificial lures and moving frequently.

Rhode Island’s chief holdover spot is the Providence River. Schools of fish move up and down it throughout the winter, requiring fishermen to move around in order to consistently find them. Small jigs work best, but swimming plugs and even live eels will catch as well. The best action here takes place after dark—a prospect that became much more appealing after the riverside tent city disbanded.

On Cape Cod, the bays and rivers on the south side and the creeks on the Cape Cod Bay side all have small populations of holdover stripers. The best place to start your search for your first bass of 2016 is the Bass River in Yarmouth.

As with most locations, these winter bass tend to seek out fresh water, and have even surprised fishermen by intercepting spinnerbaits or jerkbaits intended for a largemouth bass or pickerel.

Cape Cod’s holdovers bite best on plugs because of the shallow, slow-moving water they inhabit. Small Redfins or Bombers will get the job done on the schoolies, though fly-fishing is even more effective because a good baitfish imitation needs only to drift along with the current to look alive.

An extreme cold snap, like the one we experienced last winter, will put an end to the holdover striper bite on the Cape by putting an end to the holdover stripers. Last January, I walked through a Cape Cod marsh and found dozens of dead stripers left behind by the high tide. Rapidly falling water temperatures brought on by an extended stretch of temperatures in the teens finished off many of the bass wintering over in the shallow creek.

The rivers feeding into Boston Harbor hold a surprisingly large winter population of striped bass and not all of them are schoolies. Both the Mystic and the Charles support wintering schools above the salt line, and a herring run will keep stripers in these waters right through spring. Some fishermen theorize these fish are the same stripers that spawn in the rivers of Canada, and that Boston Harbor is the southern end of their range. Soft-plastic jigs work best here as they allow fishermen to work deep in the water column where wintering stripers hold.

The best holdover fishery belongs to Connecticut, where large numbers of schoolie stripers spend the winter in the Thames, Housatonic or Connecticut rivers. If you really need to scratch a mid-winter striper itch, it’s well worth a day trip.

Connecticut holdovers occasionally stack up within casting distance of shore, giving anglers on foot a chance to get in on the winter fun. In these rivers, I’ve seen stripers so thick that you can feel your jig bouncing off them before one finally decides to take a swipe at it. Last year, while driving from Cape Cod to Philadelphia for Christmas, I detoured by the Housatonic River just long enough to catch my last stripers of 2015. The fish were tiny but brilliantly colored, and after watching my third fish swim off, I snipped off my jig, headed for the car and did what the holdover stripers had not, and finished my journey south.