On The Water 12/16/05

1. At this time of year not much is happening in the fishing world, due to the upcoming Christmas holiday, and the fact that ocean fishing is pretty much dead and the “Fat Lady” has left the stage. I wouldn’t recommend that anyone go out on the ice, at least in this area, but there have been reports of a few crazies already testing it.
2. Fishing World, Norwalk reported that there are a few ocean herring, which are legal to keep for consumption and bait, being caught in the extreme western end of Long Island Sound. Odds are there are probably a few late-run bass chowing down on them, but no one is out there to say for sure. This year’s herring run in the Norwalk Islands was a disappointment. It was late and not up to par. Basically, even this shop’s hard-core anglers are taking a break for the season and getting out of the miserably cold weather that followed last week’s blizzard. A few of their customers are beginning to fish for steelheads on the Salmon River in Pulaski and vicinity in northern New York State.
3. Chris at Stratford Bait and Tackle said that there may be a few hard-core anglers fishing the local power plant out flows, but if they were he hadn’t heard if they caught anything. Most of the people coming into the store are Christmas shopping and rigging up for ice fishing.
4. Right now the only decent fishing to be found is in the Thames River on its overwintering stripers. As is always the case from just before Christmas till late January and mid-February, Norwich Harbor is one of the hottest spots to catch fish anywhere! When the tides are right and the bass are active, it’s possible, in fact a regular occurrence, for two anglers who know how to fish the river to catch a hundred, even two or three hundred fish between them in a tide!
5. Joe Balint of the Fish Connection, on Route 12 just south of Norwich near the Pequot Bridge, told us that the only fish in the Thames River at the present time have been caught in Norwich Harbor downriver to the Leheigh Oil Company area, which is typical for this time of year.
6. Typically, most of the bass in the river are small fish. There are tens of thousands of them piled up in massive schools the likes of which you will never see in the ocean. They stack so tightly when the barometric pressure is high and rising that the schools’ gray lines on depthfinders have fooled the uninitiated into thinking they were viewing the bottom and not a 20- to 30-foot-thick mass of striped bass. No kidding!
7. This fall, with all the heavy, flooding rains that literally washed the peanut bunker and other small bait out of the river prematurely, the normal movement upriver and its resulting blitzes never really materialized. When heavy rains occur late in the fall, and we had a number of them this year, they seem to reduce the total number of stripers that are observed overwintering. This is just speculation based on observation of school sizes and numbers over the years, but no one really knows for sure.
8. One year I used an Aqua-Vu underwater camera in an attempt to estimate how many fish there were in a typical dense school in the upper river at that time. We estimated that one school we were over was about 200 yards long, 25 to 30 yards wide and 15 to 20 feet deep, tapering to 10 feet toward the downriver end. After running over the school to get its length and width, we noted the depth readings of the fish. Then, with the camera, stripers in the viewing range were noted numerous times. Using a high figure, low figure and an average, the number of stripers was estimated by multiplying these parameters by the volume of the school.
9. The estimate came out to around 30,000 fish, using the average figure, and ranged from about 12,000 to 60,000 using the other parameters. On that day we fished three schools about that size in the upper river, so there could well be nearly a quarter of a million bass in the upper Thames River on a good year. Half or a quarter of that number of fish is a whole bunch of bass to be concentrated in such a small area.
10. So knowing these kinds of statistics, anyone can see why the fishing can be so good at times, but like fishing everywhere, there are never guarantees. We’ve had days when many hours of drifting through schools 10 to 20 feet thick only produced one or two small bass, though our jigs bumped hundreds with their mouths frozen shut. Snagging these fish is unethical and illegal, though I see bozos doing it intentionally all the time. Wait until the weight of the fish is felt, then lift gently and reel into the fish to avoid sticking hapless fish.
11. The bass are predictable, moving up and stacking thickly in Norwich Harbor with the flood tide. This is the tide that, when it occurs after dark, the shore-based anglers like best. It’s when they often catch their highest numbers and largest stripers that are normally reported every winter.
12. The average striper is 12 to 22 inches, with 28- to 32-inchers being caught on a regular basis. One time I went over the catch stats for a few years on the Thames and determined that at least during that time frame, which was the mid 90s, one fish in every 50 or so was over 30 inches. Because these are schooling fish, we might catch four or five hundred under 26 inches, then catch two 20-pounders and three others in the low 30-inch range in a trip or two.
13. You never know when a bigger fish will hit. I have noticed a definite increase in larger fish when we were catching really tiny striped bass because I think the big ones eat the dinkers. We’ve had foot-long and smaller stripers grabbed by bigger fish on a few occasions over the years. The “river rats” who fish all night on the right tides catch fewer fish overall, but on average catch a much higher percentage of 28-inch-plus bass, including some top-end catches each winter that weigh over 30 pounds.
14. Tagging information from the American Littoral Society gathered and analyzed by Captain Al Anderson was quite informative in a recent issue of The Underwater Naturalist, the organization’s publication. The tagging data he analyzed from the fish he’s personally caught indicated that, as one would expect, the Thames is a nursery for immature stripers. Captain Al believes they may be genetically programmed to seek out this or possibly other similar estuarine wintering grounds rather than crowd the spawning population in the Hudson River every winter and spring.
15. Based on the comparatively small number of tags (300 to 400 with 12 returns) my science classes have added to the Thames River and about 200 Thames River returns published by the ALS, there seems to be a direct connection between the wintering of smaller bass in the Thames and summering off Cape Cod to as far north as Maine. Homing to wintering grounds of some sort is definitely not out of the question. If it is a programmed behavior, Al is right and it’s locked into the fish’s DNA, which makes sense, being that fish are basically programmed organisms with tiny brains.
16. His hypothesis is based on an old account he came across while doing research for his excellent report for the ALS. In 1729, the Thames River’s ice broke up early due to a warm rain. Fishermen pulled a large haul seine up onto Chelsea Landing, which in those days was probably about where the restaurant of the same name sits today, some 200 yards from the present water line at the town docks. Over a couple of days of fishing, they reportedly caught 20,000 striped bass, which would indicate that my wintering population estimates might not be too far from reality. These bass tend to drop downriver with the tide, often so rapidly you can temporarily lose a school with 10,000 or more fish in it between drifts.
17. The trick is staying on top of the biggest concentrations. Most of the armada that’s turned on to this productive and fun fishery drift downriver, with small soft-plastic jigs, 4.5-inch Fin-S Fish, Zoom Flukes, Slug-Gos and other narrow-profile soft plastics under 5 inches. Jigheads will need to be changed as tide and drift speeds increase, from 3/8 to as much as ¾ ounce or more, depending on the diameter of line being used. I prefer 6- or 8-pound-test Fireline on a 6-foot spinning rod for this kind of fishing because so many of the fish are “dinks.”
18. Usually we will drift down through the schools with jigs, then run back upriver trolling small 4-inch-long Bomber Deep As in chrome/blue or chrome/black back. A few anglers are trolling successfully with mini spreader rigs that absolutely slay the fish on a small wire-line rig with 20-pound-test monel or a super braid line.
19. Cold, blustery, high-pressure days when the barometric pressure is rising will be slow, even when drifting through literally a half-million fish. A bad day on the Thames for two guys is anything under 20 fish, and a good one is hundreds. Last year my buddy Eric and guys in two other boats caught over 300 fish per boat in a single tide, and they were the only crazies fishing on that day because a storm was predicted. When a storm is approaching with dropping pressures and overcast skies or after sunset, the bass come out to play. When they do, a tide in the upper Thames anytime in the next month can well be the most productive five or six hours of fishing you will ever experience.
20. Joe Balint also noted that some of his salmon fanatics are still catching a few fish from the Shetucket River from Scotland Dam to Baltic when the water flows are right. No specific catches, but the last of the fish for the year were stocked last week, bringing the total to about 1,700 adult broodstock salmon that have been released into the Shetucket and Naugatuck rivers since late October.