Salty is sweet!

Needless to say, we had a vert disappointing striper run in the CT River this spring. If my memeory is correct, we hit flood stage 5 times between April and May in the Hartford area. This was by far the worst season I’ve had on the river. I was very much looking forward to getting back to the reefs…

I had my first charter of the season on today. i hadn’t had a chance to do much scouting so I wasn’t sure what I was going to find. Bait is always my biggest concern. With bunker and hickory shad a no show so far, we would be on the hunt for scup. We shoved off in a thick fog and made our way to my first waypoints on the porgy grounds. It took a little while to find exactly what depth they were hiding at but once we found them, we got a bunch in short order. I was expecting a lot more shorts but there were several keepers in the mix. I wanted to get to the reef early, so we decided to come back for more later and went with 6 baits to get started.

We pulled up and I got Jake and Tim rigged up and showed Tim how to drop down and hit bottom. As I was explaining my technique to him, the porgy started doing it’s death dance. Before I could even hand the rod back to Tim, the bait had been smoked by a striper! I hooked up and handed the rod over. Within 30 seconds of the bait hitting the bottom, we were on! That’s the way I want to start every season…

After a short battle, Tim got the skunk out of the boat with a fish just over 35″. Surprisingly small for a large bait but they wanted a smaller fish for the table… They got it. I bled it out and slipped it in the box.

Things got a little fuzzy after that. We had some pretty fast action for the next few hours. The guys had some BIG fish on and for whatever reason, we dropped 5 fish during the fight. Each fish was on good and screaming drag, even turning the boat in the rip. 2 of them got us in the rocks and broke off, the other 3 just came off somehow. One of them was right at the boat, I was reaching for the leader and the hooked popped out, this fish was a solid 40 pounds. I felt like throwing up… We did eventually manage to put a few nice ones in the boat with the biggest going over 30 pounds. They all went back. Here are a few pics:

All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better way to start my salt season. From here on out, I have a full schedule… There should be some big fish coming over the rails next week!