Southern New England seems to be locked into a cold weather front the last two weeks. North/northwest winds continue to dominate over the region. Striper fishing has improved slightly with small pods entering the upper bay sporadically during the week. Signs of silversides entering the bay should improve the bite. Migration of both bait supplies and stripers are lagging behind schedule for this time of late May. There are encouraging signs of fining stripers on the East Side Passage from the ferry docks on Prudence to Ohio Ledge. No bait is visually evident, so there are no signs of birds. You have to be alert and observant at all time. Soft conditions like this can only be seen for a thousand yards or you miss the action completely.
Surface action curtails quickly with the lack of dense food supply.
There are some stripers on structure looking for green crabs, mantis shrimp, and larvae. That may be your best bet while keeping a watchful eye to the horizon. Fish structure close to currents. There is lots of unproductive still water covered with seaweed and jellyfish that show no signs of life.
Capt. Ray’s Blog
Trout Unlimited’s Ed Braun and Peter Schilling of Massachusetts traded in their size #16 Comparaduns dry flies and 4 wgts. for something more beefy. Neither had ever fished Narragansett Bay before Monday so there adrenaline and anticipation ran high. Conditions were quiet with hardly a ripple across the bay. They were treated to several surface blitzes of incoming stripers finning their way up the bay channel. It seems our boat has some kind of strange curse lingering over its head. This is the second time in the last few days when we hit the mother lode only to have a huge oil tanker put them down for good.
Ed Braun shown holding one of his first Narragansett Bay stripers.
Tuesday trip was a little colder before a weather front moved in on Tuesday for veteran Joe Herbert. We headed down the East Passage looking for yesterday’s striper. The surface bite never did materialized today. This season has lacked any kind of consistency so far. The bay should be teeming with life right now.
We luck out finding some surface action south of Hog Island with no other boats in sight that lasted thirty minutes. We started fishing structure afterwards and ended up with twelve stripers on the day. Compare that to past years of thirty stripers or more per trip. That’s poor results.
I hope that everyone sees there are aggregated changes in the striper fishery each year as far as declining fish counts. Something should to be done or this negative slope will continue to affect the bio mass so much so it will never rebound.
We finally got Joe Herbert on camera. This striper just weighted out at ten pounds, enough for a picture of Joe.
