FREE SPIRIT SPORTFISHING'S
2006 STRIPER SEASON
and Their 66lb. Fish
from SportFishermen.Com
We moved the Free Spirit down to Utsch's for the fall striper season on Oct.16. As usual, my buddy Bob Cummings ran down with me to keep company and take part in our annual short trip to the bay to check out the striper fishing. We kept hearing that the fishing was pretty slow but we took our shot anyway. We fished 4 hours and had 4 nice bass chunking including 2 40"+ fish. Things started off pretty good and as the days went on, got even better. From all the reports the fishing seemed slow but I found that if you were patient and had fresh bait, good things happened. I decided to fish the bay since the rips for some reason were sporadic. One day they would be red hot , and the next, they would be colder than a mother-in-law's kiss. As a matter of fact, the only day that we did not have fish was 1 day when I tried the rips. Anyway, we fished 30+ days out of the 45 days we were there and caught fish every day except for the 1 I mentioned. Most of the fish chunking were legal sized. We caught 9 fish total that were shorts and 3 of them came on the last day we fished up the bay. There was no special spot but I simply ran edges at 18 kts watching my Raymarine High Definition Fish Finder. If you have never seen those units work, you have to see it to believe the clarity of the targets. It was clutter free and when I saw fish, I would spin around to verify and then drop the hook and take a shot. If there was no action within 1/2 hr. or so, we'd do it again. From the start, the fish seemed to be mostly fresh from the ocean fish that had sea lice on them and were bright silvery, gorgeous fish. The average fish was probably around 39" with a load of fish over 40". The smallest keeper was 32" and was caught on the 1st trip.
We had several days where we ended up back early since the folks limited and I did not want to take a chance on injuring any other fish. I use Daichi 7/0 circle hooks exclusively and for the most part, the fish are jaw hooked but occasionally, we did hook a fish deeper. Some days the heads were the ticket and other days, chunks paid off. Interesting is that most of the fish I heard of over 40# were chunk eaters. Every day was a blast. My customers all are pretty great folks and we had a good time. Almost every person was able to catch the largest striper they had ever caught this Fall. There were loads of 1st time striper anglers and they varied from an 8 year old with a 39" fish to an angler who had his 1st fish- a 66# monster. With the boat's ability to handle seas easily and comfortably, I was able fish and catch on days when other boats sat at the dock. We missed 3 days in November and 1 was Thanksgiving.
