When blue and striper are together ...

[chingweiliao]

Hi Friends:

Recently my day time fishing experienced a mix between blue and striper, which is rather difficult for me. Since small blue hit and tear off my bait but bass swallow it. But for setting the hook my reflex couldn't repond in time to distinguish this two.

For bass, I always use drop back tatic but facing small blues it won't work. Any idea how to catch bass while avoid small blue stealing my bait--or catch them as well.

By the way, when I sense blue is around I use stingsilver (metal lure) or swimmer plug and present them with little twich while reeling but blue did not take it. When I present my lures, there are 25 inch of blues taken around me through chunked herring. Why is that, I thought blue like moving shining and live fish better than dead drifted chunk. Any thought about this.

[Raven]

have you tried any top water baits ,.....poppers in particular?
or just swimmers? try fishing off to the side more of where you think the main pod of blues are. In any scenario try something weird, new or different to get a different response or some more CLUES! are you using metal leaders (black or silver?) flourocarbon
leaders or just mono?.... Many many discoveries have happened as a result of a mistake or accident happening that changed the
methodology (the method) used in the experiment. As for hook setting try counting. time them ! if you can... just my thoughts.

[Christian]

raven avatar.

[chingweiliao]

Hi raven:

I were using steel leader with blue swimmer plug (its is near the surface most of the time) and metal stinger (painted white). The action from the chunk bait is near the bottom and near the breakway whereas I tried to retrieve my bait from the middle of river mouth against current and I fan out my lure in several sub angles within 45 degree. By the way, I did deliberately slow down my stinger to cover deeper regions.

[Fly Rod]

I find that people that are using lures when everybody else is chunking don't fare well. The fish are keying on the chunks. Boats going by seeing us catching stop and start trolling lures and aren't as sucessfull. When blues and stripers are mixed the key to successfull fishing is plenty of hooks if using mono or fluorcarbon We had about 20 break offs with blues the other day while striper fishing for 2hrs.