bluesdude71
11-15-2009, 06:29 PM
Informative article -
A Rare Jig Lures the Striper Other Anglers Only Dream About
By Nelson Bryant
Published: Sunday, June 22, 1997
8339
During the first 15 minutes of casting from my brother Dan's boat, which was drifting on the incoming tide in the channel between Menemsha jetties and Menemsha Pond, he hooked, landed and released four striped bass while I went hitless, a victim of my own stubbornness.
Dan was using a one-handed freshwater bait casting outfit and a half-ounce jig called a Bait Tail, and I was using a fly rod with a sinking tip line and a fly of my own design.
My brother had his fly rod aboard but chose to start fishing with the Bait Tail because he had taken about 20 fish with it in the same location the day before.
''If you can catch them on a Bait Tail, I can do the same with a fly,'' I told him when he invited me along. I was confident enough to leave my jig-casting gear behind. In defense of my recalcitrance, I had been yearning to cast flies for stripers since mid-April, when the first bass showed up earlier than usual along the south shore of Martha's Vineyard, where Dan and I live.
During the last of April and the first three weeks of May, however, there had hardly been a day when gales or near gales were not coming from some quarter of the compass, and I have reached a stage in which I prefer to do my fly-fishing under reasonable conditions.
Several spin fishermen and one fly-rod angler were working the west side of the channel. Although they were reaching the fish, they caught only one during the hour that I watched them. Dan said that the same thing had happened the previous day when he was out there, and one young fellow had asked Dan what he was using. He had never heard of a Bait Tail, which was not unusual: he probably had not yet been born when the manufacture of them ceased.
The Bait Tail is a lead-headed jig with a somewhat stiff, slightly tapered, straight-sided replaceable plastic body in various colors. It was the 1960's invention of Al Reinfelder and Lou Palma, who made it in various sizes as well as a lead-headed eel with a plastic body, both under the brand name Alou.
Dan and I often fished with those men when they visited the Vineyard and so came to possess a good supply of Bait Tails and Alou eels. But now, nearly 30 years later, we are running short of Bait Tails and never use them for bluefish, whose sharp teeth destroy the lure's plastic body.
The Bait Tail, which has no action except that imparted by the angler, resembles no particular forage fish, but it can be extraordinarily effective, especially in a strong current when stripers are not feeding on top. Its commercial demise may, in part, be ascribed to its drab appearance. It has no angler appeal until it is fished.
This day, the bass were small, averaging about 18 inches, but they were plentiful, appearing in droves on the depth recorder in Dan's boat. We were usually in 7 to 10 feet of water and the fish ranged from the bottom to about 4 feet below the surface. After a half-hour of fruitless casting, I tried half a dozen other patterns, some large, some small, some weighted, all to no avail.
Changing flies was a challenge. Dan's Labrador retriever Duchess was with us. She loves to go fishing and runs about the boat wailing and moaning and peering into the water when a fish is hooked. Her gyrations inevitably caused her to get tangled in my line or leader, often just as I was knotting on a fly. But we are close friends, so all I could do was growl at her. This kept her away momentarily, but as soon as Dan was fast to another bass, her wild dance resumed. After an hour of this, I stowed my rod and became an observer.
By that time, the tide was in full spate, perhaps six or seven knots and the bass were moving up and down the channel, rarely showing on top. Wondering if my flies were not working because the current was keeping them from getting down to the fish, I tied one on as a dropper above Dan's Bait Tail, which he was allowing to sink close to the bottom before retrieving.
He quickly caught four more bass, but all were on the lure, not the fly. This was surprising, because they appeared to feeding mainly on large sand eels, which the dropper fly resembled. My brother had caught and released about 20 bass before the fishing slacked off. I asked him to keep trying for a few more minutes.
''There's got to be at least one keeper out there,'' I said, adding that I craved a meal of fresh striper.
A short while later, he fulfilled my wish. The fish was nearly 2 inches over the 28-inch limit. We examined its stomach contents when we cleaned it: a round rock the size of a robin's egg with a tendril of seaweed attached -- clearly, the undulating weed had attracted the fish -- and one recently swallowed alewife, commonly called herring in New England. There is a herring run at the upper end of Menemsha Pond, and we later learned that that evening a striper of about 40 pounds was caught there by an angler using a live herring as bait.
Dan gave me one of the fillets from the striper and I saved its head for a chowder.
A Rare Jig Lures the Striper Other Anglers Only Dream About
By Nelson Bryant
Published: Sunday, June 22, 1997
8339
During the first 15 minutes of casting from my brother Dan's boat, which was drifting on the incoming tide in the channel between Menemsha jetties and Menemsha Pond, he hooked, landed and released four striped bass while I went hitless, a victim of my own stubbornness.
Dan was using a one-handed freshwater bait casting outfit and a half-ounce jig called a Bait Tail, and I was using a fly rod with a sinking tip line and a fly of my own design.
My brother had his fly rod aboard but chose to start fishing with the Bait Tail because he had taken about 20 fish with it in the same location the day before.
''If you can catch them on a Bait Tail, I can do the same with a fly,'' I told him when he invited me along. I was confident enough to leave my jig-casting gear behind. In defense of my recalcitrance, I had been yearning to cast flies for stripers since mid-April, when the first bass showed up earlier than usual along the south shore of Martha's Vineyard, where Dan and I live.
During the last of April and the first three weeks of May, however, there had hardly been a day when gales or near gales were not coming from some quarter of the compass, and I have reached a stage in which I prefer to do my fly-fishing under reasonable conditions.
Several spin fishermen and one fly-rod angler were working the west side of the channel. Although they were reaching the fish, they caught only one during the hour that I watched them. Dan said that the same thing had happened the previous day when he was out there, and one young fellow had asked Dan what he was using. He had never heard of a Bait Tail, which was not unusual: he probably had not yet been born when the manufacture of them ceased.
The Bait Tail is a lead-headed jig with a somewhat stiff, slightly tapered, straight-sided replaceable plastic body in various colors. It was the 1960's invention of Al Reinfelder and Lou Palma, who made it in various sizes as well as a lead-headed eel with a plastic body, both under the brand name Alou.
Dan and I often fished with those men when they visited the Vineyard and so came to possess a good supply of Bait Tails and Alou eels. But now, nearly 30 years later, we are running short of Bait Tails and never use them for bluefish, whose sharp teeth destroy the lure's plastic body.
The Bait Tail, which has no action except that imparted by the angler, resembles no particular forage fish, but it can be extraordinarily effective, especially in a strong current when stripers are not feeding on top. Its commercial demise may, in part, be ascribed to its drab appearance. It has no angler appeal until it is fished.
This day, the bass were small, averaging about 18 inches, but they were plentiful, appearing in droves on the depth recorder in Dan's boat. We were usually in 7 to 10 feet of water and the fish ranged from the bottom to about 4 feet below the surface. After a half-hour of fruitless casting, I tried half a dozen other patterns, some large, some small, some weighted, all to no avail.
Changing flies was a challenge. Dan's Labrador retriever Duchess was with us. She loves to go fishing and runs about the boat wailing and moaning and peering into the water when a fish is hooked. Her gyrations inevitably caused her to get tangled in my line or leader, often just as I was knotting on a fly. But we are close friends, so all I could do was growl at her. This kept her away momentarily, but as soon as Dan was fast to another bass, her wild dance resumed. After an hour of this, I stowed my rod and became an observer.
By that time, the tide was in full spate, perhaps six or seven knots and the bass were moving up and down the channel, rarely showing on top. Wondering if my flies were not working because the current was keeping them from getting down to the fish, I tied one on as a dropper above Dan's Bait Tail, which he was allowing to sink close to the bottom before retrieving.
He quickly caught four more bass, but all were on the lure, not the fly. This was surprising, because they appeared to feeding mainly on large sand eels, which the dropper fly resembled. My brother had caught and released about 20 bass before the fishing slacked off. I asked him to keep trying for a few more minutes.
''There's got to be at least one keeper out there,'' I said, adding that I craved a meal of fresh striper.
A short while later, he fulfilled my wish. The fish was nearly 2 inches over the 28-inch limit. We examined its stomach contents when we cleaned it: a round rock the size of a robin's egg with a tendril of seaweed attached -- clearly, the undulating weed had attracted the fish -- and one recently swallowed alewife, commonly called herring in New England. There is a herring run at the upper end of Menemsha Pond, and we later learned that that evening a striper of about 40 pounds was caught there by an angler using a live herring as bait.
Dan gave me one of the fillets from the striper and I saved its head for a chowder.