Eldredge

     While standing on a dock in a local estuary around 8pm last Tuesday, my trout addiction took a major blow as a large school of 6 inch herring swirled at my feet with several stripers hot on their tails. I’d just launched my skiff for the first time this year and put it out on my assigned float. It was a record late launch for me. It blew my previous late launch record to hell. I was actually feeling a bit ridiculous as old friends were coming by in their boats saying stuff like “where the hell have you been”, “we thought you were done with stripers”, “you aint gonna catch no trout down heyah”. Standing alone on the dock a while later, watching the stripers feed, I decided that I might give the trout a rest for a bit. A little bit.
     I fished the salt for two days this past week. I decided to concentrate mostly on sight fishing for a couple of days. The tides were awesome for that and the sun was good but the wind did blow, as it always seems to blow. My friend Florian was down from Quebec and he fished the first day with me. He had six good shots and hooked up on one of them. Although it was the smallest fish we saw it gave him a good line burn on its first run. Day two was with my friend John and he had many shots at skinny water stripers. I do believe that we encountered the fussiest bass that I’ve ever witnessed. It didn’t help that I was still getting the rust off of my poling skills and John was getting the rust off his backcast presentations, but we still had some great presentations with old favorite, well proven flats patterns but the stripers just refused to be fooled. We fished some deep water spots just to get the skunk out of the boat and John landed two slot size stripers and one just over 30 inches on guitar minnows. It was great to be back on the salt with its wonderful aromas, sounds and beautiful scenery. I hope all of you trout bums out there get a chance to cast to a few stripers this season. It might just turn out to be casting practice for you but it might also turn out to be the best fishing story of your life.        
 
    Local striper reports have been very encouraging. I’ve had endless reports from boat fisherman getting into huge schools of big stripers feeding on herring and mackerel. Most of the feeds are out of reach for the shore bound fly fishers but a few that I’ve heard about were within fly casting distance. The rest were from just off shore to several miles offshore. The amount of bait around our area is fantastic. We have 2” to 9” long herring, Mackerel, silver sides, sandeels and squid. The squid reports are like I’ve never heard. There are huge numbers of them from Marthas Vineyard to north of our area. My friend DJ has been doing very well on squid flies. He tyes beautiful squid flys and has been gracious enough to tye some for our shop. Other flies that have been working well are Guitar Minnows, Emu Bucktails, Eyed Snakes, Punky Meadows, standard Deceivers and Clousers.

Good luck!

Jim

Many of my fishing trips are the “spur of the moment” type of trips. I see a window of opportunity to get away and I take it. I’ve become much better at this as I’ve gotten older and since I’ve realized that fishing & camping alone can be fun too. You can do what you want when you want to do it. There is a sense of freedom to these trips that I don’t get when I’m fishing with a group of friends.

However, these types of trips lack the anticipation I get from a well planned fishing trip. That anticipation truly helps me maintain my sanity through the winter months. When lifes tough moments start to get to me, I can take a moment, sit back and look to that carrot hanging out there. It’s the trip. No matter how bad things get I know that I have time set aside to be with friends and share our common passion of the trip. As the years pass the trip develops its own history and throughout the winter we all talk about the trip. Are you going to make the trip this year? Have you tied any new flies for the trip? What do you think the fishing will be like on this year’s trip? Is Jen making us an apple pie for the trip? I hope that your dog doesn’t puke in the tent again on the trip!       

I just returned from one of the trips that I most anticipate. I spent two nights camping and three days of fishing up north with Dave Kelly and Maine Guide Kevin McKay. We’ve been doing this annual trip for several years. Each year Kevin suggests different locations throughout Maine to do the trip and this definitely adds to our anticipation. Kevin has always done a great job setting it up and this year was no exception. The camping was fun and the meals were phenomenal. Kevin’s lovely wife Jen provided us with her awesome apple pie. I think that Jen’s apple pie has become as important to the trip as the trout have. We had a wonderful time chasing brookies and landlocked salmon. The hatches were good and the fish were mostly feeding on caddis but we also saw blue wing olives, golden stones, lime & yellow Sally’s, and sulfurs coming off.  We caught fish on streamers and nymphs but our best success was on dry flies.  Dave and I both lost big fish at the boat. We laughed away a winters worth of stress and the dog puked in the tent. What a trip!

 If you are interested in guided trip with Kevin McKay you can contact him at http://www.mainefishingadventures.com/  I highly recommend him. 

Jim

The striper reports that are flooding into the shop are almost too good to believe. One report was of a client on a guided trip who landed 20 stripers over 35” the largest being just over 40”. I’ve heard about 5 minute long blitzes and 5 hour long blitzes. Some anglers are telling me about evasive schools of 50” cow bass and others are saying they are catching the smallest striped bass that they have ever seen. On the other hand I’ve had some striper fishermen that can’t find the bass. I think this summer is shaping up to be a very similar pattern to the past several years when the bass were predictable when they first arrived but after about a month they couldn’t be found in any of the once reliable spots. The anglers who have one favorite spot to fish may get a striper here and there but overall they may have a tough summer. The anglers who are willing to keep trying new areas might just stumble onto some truly fantastic fishing. The more mobile that you are the better the rewards might be. I already know of two anglers this summer that have tried this and both had some of the best striper fishing they have ever had. There is an enormous amount of bait in our coastal waters. I’m mostly hearing about sand eels, baby Atlantic herring, mackerel, pollock, silversides, and squid.
    All of these reports have come from people I trust and not from my first hand knowledge this year as I am still suffering from trout-itis. I’m still traveling north each of my weekends and I’m still finding very good fishing and some great hatches. I just wish that I could move into my Hotel Tacoma for a summer of trout exploration throughout Maine, some day…!  For those of you waiting for the Hexes to come off, they’ve been doing so in southern Maine for about a week. Here are some fresh water photos from the past few weeks. I’ve decided not to take fish photos of trout unless I can do so by keeping the trout out of the water for only a few seconds, which is close to impossible when fishing alone.

    I’ve spent the last month fishing the freshwater north of here and I can’t seem to get enough of it. Many people are coming into the shop all excited about how good the striper fishing has been and my friends are calling to tell me striper stories and encourage me to get out there but I can only ask them if they want to head north to chase trout and smallmouth. When I go home after work I have to walk past my striper skiff on the way to my shack. The skiff needs about two weeks worth of repairs before I can drop it in the salt and I can hardly give it a second glance.  Instead I’ve been going right to my tying bench to work on smallmouth or trout flies. Tonight I’m anxious to come up with a subsurface crippled caddis adult. I just know that I could have caught more trout and landlocks on my last trip to the north woods if I had had some. As a crow fly’s, I live less than a mile from fantastic striper fishing. If I wasn’t so lazy I could walk there. It takes me about 3 to 4 hours and about $60.00 bucks in gas to drive one way to some of my favorite trout waters. I’ve spent more time thinking of ways to turn my capped truck bed into a “Hotel Tacoma” than I have on thoughts of skiff repair maintenance.  Two spin guys bought some frozen mackerel from me about an hour ago and I couldn’t help think that their bellies have the exact sheen as mayfly wings. The mackerel bellies that is, not the spin guys. My life has been a succession of fishing obsessions and right now it is all trout. When the wind blew onshore the other day I could smell salt in the air and it made me think of sea run browns and brookies. I’ve got it bad.  I suppose all it will take is for someone to wave a 40 inch cow bass under my nose and I’ll say screw the skiff repairs and drop her in the salt, but for now it’s trout. Head north my friends, the fishing and hatches have been phenomenal!!

    Here are some pictures from the last month. I’ve been mostly fishing alone for trout and have opted for quick releases without taking the fish out of the water so I apologize for the lack of trout pictures. I did get a shot of a cool 19”+ brookie that was two toned and stayed close after I popped the hook out of her.

    More reports are coming in about stripers. No big numbers yet but most of the fish being caught are in the high twenty inch to low thirty inch size range. All reports are from the river mouths or up in the estuaries. Yesterday I saw a school of stripers busting on bait during our Spey Class.  A flock of seagulls drew my attention to it and the bass were on the feed for about fifteen minutes. Congratulations to my buddy Bryant who landed his first striper of the season last Thursday. It measured 32”.
    
    Freshwater fishing is also getting good. Now that we have been fortunate enough to have some rain our rivers and streams have good flows. Local pond fishing has been good too.  Blue wing olives were seen hatching this past week as well as caddis and red quills.

    I went fishing for shad for a couple of hours on Wednesday but I didn’t have any luck. I ran into two Elver fishermen that had been tending their nets. For those of you who don’t know what an Elver is, they are baby eels that have migrated here from their birthplace in the Sargasso Sea. Upon their arrival into our brackish tidal rivers they seek out freshwater rivers, lakes and ponds where they will live until reaching maturity. The mature eels then swim back to the Sargasso sea where they will spawn and then die.  One of the Elver fisherman that I ran into told me that he’d only seen a few shad caught this year and the other told me that he’d caught an Atlantic Salmon in his net. He said it was only 14 inches long so I suspect that it was a chromed sea run brown. He told me, “we also catch a few browns from time to time”. They were friendly people and I know that they are just trying to make a buck, but I long for the day that Maine outlaws Elver fishing. It saddens me to see the myriad of fyke nets clogging our tidal rivers. It seems impossible that enough Elvers could possibly make there way upstream to fresh water to continue a healthy propagation of the species. This year the season started with an  incredible, almost obscene, payoff of $2’000.00 per pound of Elvers. There are estimated to be 2500 Maine Elvers to a pound. I talked to an Elver fisherman two years ago who told me that they had caught 4 pounds of Elvers in one night. South Carolina and Maine are the last two states on the entire eastern seaboard that still allow fishing for Elvers.  All of the other states have banned fishing for them. If you want to learn more about Elvers check out the book Eels by James Prosek. It is a very interesting book.           


Jim

I had a report that Saturday night the Merrimac was fishing very well. Many stripers were caught.  We’ve just started getting our first reports of stripers showing up in our area this past weekend. On Saturday my buddy DJ landed a striper that was 32” while fishing a #2 Guitar Minnow. His was the first solid report of fresh migrating stripers of the season. On Sunday both DJ and Jeff Barnum reported catching stripers. Jeff ‘s striper was 31” and DJ’s was slot size. Inshore water temps have risen during the last couple of days so more reports should start to come in. As the stripers start to arrive they usually head for the warmer waters of our local tidal rivers and estuaries.  Blue Back Herring and alewives have been running up the rivers to spawn for at least a couple of weeks now and we had some reports of holdover bass feeding heavily on them. Baby Atlantic herring have started to show up also. No solid reports of shad locally but I’m sure that they are in the local rivers too.  Good luck!

Jim