- Sep 30, 2022
Walk the Dog Topwater Tactics for East Coast Stripers
This is the best time of the year for exciting top-water action from the surf, inlet or boat while casting walking topwater lures!
This is the best time of the year for exciting top-water action from the surf, inlet or boat while casting walking topwater lures!
There’s nothing like the thrill of working your favorite beach or jetty with a swimming plug! Learn how surfcasting can produce great fall fishing action.
Surfcasting artificial baits along your favorite stretch of beach for puts you close to the action! Part of the joy is feeling the waves churn and surge as you cast just beyond the breakers or feeling the refreshing spray as you walk carefully out a jetty. More importantly, surfcasting provides an extremely effective way to catch striped bass, bluefish and other gamefish, especially during fall, when baitfish and gamefish push close to beaches.
Large bays hold major concentrations of feeding striped bass during late spring. Learn about the best lures and tactics for spring striper fishing.
No other fish in the Northeast sparks a saltwater angler’s interest during springtime like the striped bass. Every year, from late March through June, striped bass schools migrate northward along the Eastern Seaboard to follow their innate call for the ritual of spawning. Three main spawning grounds are defined: the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware River and Hudson River. All three areas have one factor in common: The stripers must move through large expanses of big estuarial bays.
In New Jersey, Raritan Bay is the gateway to the Hudson River, and the expanse presents world-class opportunities for spring striper fishing. Here’s a look at the top striped bass fishing lures and tactics for successful spring striper fishing.
Learn about different Pop-R models and when to use each to maximize success.
You know the Rebel Pop-R. It’s the most iconic popper in the fishing world, a name commonly used to reference various poppers and the unofficial template for many other popping lures.
You may not realize that the Rebel Lures makes several different Pop-R models, all with much in common but each a little different. We’ll look at all the Pop-Rs and dig into how each is distinctive to help you pick the perfect Pop-R for any given situation.
Learn about the Heddon Super Spook Boyo and the important niches it fills for topwater fishing action from many species of gamefish.
“That’s the new Boyo,” said Micah Frazier, a Bassmaster Elite Series pro from Newnan Georgia, as he swung a topwater-caught bass into the boat. It was a cool autumn morning, and we’d been throwing subsurface lures. Frazier had spotted some minnow movement at that surface, prompting him to pick up his Super Spook Boyo rod.
The Super Spook Boyo, new from Heddon Lures, offers elements of new and old. It’s a new size of Super Spook that fills an important niche for many different types of fishing in both freshwater and saltwater settings. However, it uses the time-proven Heddon Spook design and is easy to walk and effective for calling fish to the surface.
With a dozen or so other lure models already in the Heddon Spook family, it almost doesn’t seem like there could have been a place for another Spook. However, the immediate popularity of the Boyo and the ongoing flow of success stories from all over the country leave zero doubt that need for this particular Spook existed.
Don’t buy into summer doldrums talk. Late summer offers some of the best jigging spoon action of the year, with a range of presentations prompting excellent fish-catching action.
First a disclaimer: If you don’t like multi-species fishing and always need to know what’s at the end of your line, the summer spoon bite might not be for you. While you can target stripers, white bass or hybrids based on waterways and locations and typically will catch more of the target species than fish of other kinds, it’s not uncommon to catch 10 species in a day with a summer spoon-fishing approach, and any fish that wallops a spoon could turn out to be a 1-pound crappie or a 50-pound flathead.
That noted, jigging spoons provide spectacular opportunities to catch the “true bass” species (stripers, white bass and striper/white bass hybrids) during late summer, when these fish are chasing big schools of shad and herring in open water. Jigging spoons “match the hatch” very effectively and have built-in versatility that makes them solid matches for most summer scenarios with these species.
The striper bite has heated up along the Atlantic coast. Learn the best techniques for getting in on this exciting fishing action.
Ask any Northeast angler: No other saltwater species attracts more fervor, with a cult-like following, than the striped bass, also knows as rockfish, linesider, striper, or even the affectionate old-school term of “ol’ Pajamas.”
Although striped bass are found in many areas, including Northern California and freshwater impoundments from the South to parts of the West, the coastal striper’s epicenter spans the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast from Maine to North Carolina. With average size classes ranging from 5 to 50 pounds on any given day, the species can be hooked on a variety of methods, all certain to raise your adrenaline level.
Landlocked stripers can be a pretty difficult puzzle to figure out in the heart of winter, but if you play your cards right you can stumble on some of the most fun bites of the year! By play your cards right I mean chucking the YUM Flash Mob Jr as much as possible, it seems to put the best cards in your favor during the coldest times of year. It is certainly the large part of the how in how to catch the most stripers.
Most anglers luck into a striper every few trips while bass fishing in the winter, but you can increase those odds with a few helpful tips. These tips all have to do with location, proper equipment, and style of fishing.