Coldwater Cows: Late Season Stripers on Herring
It was December 16, 2001, and after a Scotch tasting at the Angler’s Club, I had fallen asleep (read: “passed out”) on the subway back to Rockaway. It was amazing I still had my wallet, not to mention my laptop, when I awoke somewhere in Brooklyn to my phone ringing. I tried to say hello, but my voice wasn’t yet working. “Where the hell are you?” said Capt. David Azar before I could speak. We were going to make one last go of it before pulling the boat and calling it a season. “Get a cup of coffee and I’ll be there in a half an hour I said.” An hour later I was fighting off a splitting headache while peeling back the fingers of my fleece gloves so that I could chip the ice off the overboard discharge tube of my outboard. I could see my breath as I blew on the tips of my fingers in hopes that I would be able to feel them again soon. By now I was beginning to seriously doubt my decision to not pull the boat two weeks ago. My outboard sputtered and stalled when I turned the key. Apparently it wasn’t happy about being out on this cold water either. After a few words of encouragement, it sputtered to life and we were off.
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Ten minutes later we are greeted at Breezy Point jetty by acres of gannets dive-bombing the water. As we approached, one of the most extraordinary bass blitzes occurred right before our eyes. Hundreds of fish north of 20-pounds plowing though schools of 10-inch herring. Suddenly my headache was gone and we were both quite warm. We released so many fish that day in the 20- to 30-pound range we lost count. Good thing I didn’t pull the boat!
Before getting into the details of such extraordinary December fishing in my neck of the woods, let me offer the following disclaimer: It’s usually not this good. Any local sharpie will tell you that December in New York Harbor is dominated by schoolies. Usually you’ll find plenty of these small fish under birds on peanut bunker or sand eels. Once I start seeing vast numbers of those 20-inch fish, I know it’s going to be over soon. Yet every few years the stars align and the conditions are just right for all those big bass that have been hanging out in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut to come booking down the coast right about the time the herring arrive. When that happens, all hell breaks loose.
It’s no secret that big bait brings in big fish, and these herring are generally in the 10-inch range. And it’s also well known that bass tend to get a little crazy in the fall. Particularly in the late fall. As they prepare for the long migration, these fish eat anything and everything, attacking their meals with reckless abandon. Far from being over, December can be the best month of the year for sticking a trophy bass on light tackle. But as I mentioned, it certainly doesn’t happen every year.
In 2001, we had a particularly warm November, but when December rolled around we had some significant cold snaps, followed by quite a few unseasonably warm days before it got nasty again. I believe this created the perfect conditions for the bass and herring to be at the same place at the same time.
Undoubtedly, a successful and productive December depends not only on herring, but the timing of the striped bass migration, and that has a lot to do with the weather. In my experience, we need to have a relatively warm November for the stripers to hang around long enough for their migration to intersect that of the herring. If it gets cold and nasty early in November, the larger fish tend to move down the coast faster than they would have otherwise, thereby never encountering the herring in our neck of the woods. Optimally, what we want is a benign November without any snow. It doesn’t matter that much if it gets cold quickly in December as it would take a while for the water temp to catch up. Plus, cold snaps turn fish on and make them feed like crazy. Of course, getting out in such conditions presents its own set of challenges.
Such outstanding fishing in Lower New York Harbor also depends on the arrival of the herring, of course. Usually it’s late November when these fish head to overwintering areas from the New York Bight to Cape Hatteras. While overfished (and with an uncertain future), Atlantic herring are still considered one of the most abundant fish species of the world. Living and traveling in large schools, these silvery streamlined fish are 9 to 14 inches long.
The best thing about this last shot at stripers is their sometimes extraordinary size. There is really no other time of the year where you can witness large bass blitzing large bait in such a reckless fashion. There are the occasional blitzes on adult bunker in the spring in North Jersey, but in the fall, bass are frantic to pack on pounds feed all the more voraciously. The ferocity of a late-fall, bass-on-herring blitz is a sight to behold.
In order to see a large number of herring in Lower New York Harbor, cold conditions are key. It’s generally well known that herring are a coldwater species, and their arrival usually depends on a good stint of below freezing air temperatures.
Since 2001, we’ve had several years of big fish on herring, but it never lasted more than a day or two. Usually, once those cold snaps start happening in December, they don’t stop. And with cold snaps, you usually get hard northwest wind which makes getting out to the fish difficult. I’d have to think there were plenty of crazy-big bass blitzes on herring on those days where it was just too cold and too windy to sail. So it’s a reasonable possibility that this sort of extraordinary fishing happens for a week or two during every December, but the weather is just too nasty for anyone to get out and be there for the blitzes. And really, few folks would even bother withstanding such uninviting elements like freezing salt spray, especially after December 15th, when striper fishing in New York State becomes catch and release only.
There have also been plenty of years where the herring arrive and all we have are schoolies around because the big fish have already left. It’s interesting to witness a 20-inch fish trying to eat a 10-inch bait, but not quite as fun as watching a 20-pounder eat a pencil popper.
Striped bass can certainly withstand stand some very cold water temps. Striped bass are cold-water animals, after all. I’ve found that they’re not adverse to water temperatures in the 40s, as long as that big bait is around. That leaves us a large space in the late fall/early winter where these fish are still actively feeding. And when they feed during this time of the year, man, they really feed! But, if there isn’t much other bait around, such as peanut bunker and/or sandeels, the larger bass aren’t likely to stick around long. Keep in mind these fish are on the move and if there isn’t any forage they aren’t going to stay.
Finding herring can be as easy as looking for gannets. These are large birds. They look like a seagull on steroids, yet they are easily distinguished not only due to their size but by the fact that they shoot straight down into the water from great heights, actually submersing themselves completely to catch their prey. Gannets tend to follow larger baits, and when they arrive in the late fall, they are almost always on herring.
My favorite bait for the herring-crazed bass is a blue-and-white pencil popper. The noise-making capabilities and the enticing side-to-side wounded-baitfish action gets a stripers attention right quick, and their profile looks very much like a herring’s. If you pick up a herring you will also notice a blue tint to its back, thus the reason I prefer to use the blue and white color. The primary reason this is my first choice out of the box is because of the awesome surface strikes the pencil will draw. Bass just hammer these things, sometimes coming completely out of the water to grab them. There are dozens of manufacturers, but I use the plastic Cotton Cordell version for a few reasons. The first is the fact that it floats. Sometimes, particularly later in the day, you’ll get increasingly wary fish that follow your plug, boiling on it, but not striking it. When this happens I find I get a lot of strikes by pausing the bait (leaving it dead in the water). I get a lot of hard takes once I start retrieving it after such a pause. You simply can’t do that if you have a plug that sinks. There’s also the added benefit of keeping the plug in the water longer with such pauses. I also like these baits because the have a rattle in them which undoubtedly draws attention.
Next on my list of go-to lures would be the 9-inch Slug-Go or similar soft plastics. These baits offer a pretty good size and profile imitation of a wounded herring, and both draw some ferocious surface strikes when worked on or just under the surface. Of course, you can fish down deep also, and guys do stick some pretty good fish with diamond jigs, weighted soft-plastics and bucktails, but why would you want to bother doing that when you can catch them on the surface? Big ravenous surface feeing stripers is what the late-season New York Harbor fishing is all about in my book. If you’re a fly-fisher, throw big slender flies. Sure there are herring patterns out there, but anything with a lot of long feathers seems to work just fine in this situation.
If you fish the Lower New York Harbor area, perhaps you should think twice before winterizing the boat, or putting all your surf gear away for the winter. In December striped bass are preparing for their migration down to their wintering grounds offshore of North Carolina and Virginia. It’s quite a long journey, and they burn a lot of calories along the way, so these bass feel a strong biological urge to fatten up and pack on the fuel for the trip. If the weather patterns allow a meeting of the herring and stripers in New York Waters, it can result in some of the most extraordinary blitzes of the year. Let’s hope that happens this year.
Source: https://onthewater.com/coldwater-cows-late-season-stripers-on-herring
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