North Shore, MA Schoolies

Last night fell into place nicely. I checked the tides and saw it was roughly a 9:30pm low tide on the North Shore, MA and a 7:30pm sunset so I couldn't say no. I was able to convince my buddy that we would certainly get into fish with a solid 2 hours of fishing. My buddy is from the West Coast and had been scouting and fishing striper spots only to get skunked. He told me he thought that the striped bass might be an elusive animal after all his stalking.

We got to our spot about 7:30pm, geared up, and set out. We had the water to ourselves! First cast, STRIKE! Fish on an all white clouser (schoolie fly-fisherman's ole' trusty). It had been a while so I had a pretty poor hook set. A few minutes later, a second hookup with another sub-par hook set. Finally, I was able to land a nice schoolie and I had to let out a sigh of relief. 

Now my friend and I have fished together before, but it didn't produce any fish. So at this point, I was starting to worry that I might be bad luck for him and I needed to get him a fish. He had been stalking stripers on the fly all spring and is headed down to the Cheeky Fly Fishing Tournament this weekend without knowing what a tight-lined striper felt like. Well a chartreuse and white clouser seemed to do the trick. 

We got into fish up until 9:30pm at night on clousers, deceivers, gurglers (right as they hit the surface and stripped once, BAMMMMM), and sand eel patterns. It was an overall great night and it is still early in the season. We landed 10 fish between the 2 of us and hooked into easily 20. There was a little surface action from here and there where fish would start crashing for 5 minutes then stop and then start again.

Get out while the schoolies are hitting hard!

If it's white, it's tight!

-The Fly Fiend