Monday, October 31, 2011

Small school of Stripers

I went out this afternoon with a friend to scout for bait and fish. After catching about 40 8 to 10 inch Gizzards we started looking for Stripers. The wind was blowing out of the East so I did not expect to see very large schools today. We looked and fished for a couple hours finding schools like the one on the picture above. The sonar screen on the left shows a small school only about 10 yards wide with the fish stacked up pretty tight. When I see this configuration of fish the Stripers are generally not feeding. The Stripers were very tight to each other and there was no streaking which would indicate the fish were not feeding. The upper line on the sonar is my sinker and the line just below it rising up to the sinker is my Gizzard getting chased by the Striper that can be seen streaking up chasing the bait which did hook up and eventually boated. The fish was a smaller 5 pound Striper and notice only one fish was interested.
The right screen is Structure Scan set on Side Scan in a 80 foot range. The boat is at 0 and we can see the size of the school and actually how tight it was. The school was only about 100 feet wide by 10 yards long with maybe a couple hundred fish mixed into the group. We boated only 2 fish out of this particular school, again the fish were pretty lethargic at the time this picture was taken. The fish would only hit the downlines that I had set at 24 feet deep, [The big Gizz had swam up to avoid the school of fish]. The Stripers would not engage my freelines that I had out on a dozen boards. If the school was broken up more and numerous fish could have been seen on the Lowrance my boards would have also hooked up. We caught our limits easily and got home in time to climb up in a stand for the evening.

No comments: