The first fresh linesides will be here before you know it… As my own professional clock has unwound the last decade or so, I have found it increasingly difficult to heed one particularly well-worn piece of my own advice, namely that, in writing as in fishing, when in doubt, simplify. Simplify, simplify, simplify. We give fish entirely too much credit, we overthink our own strategy, we gunk up the works trying to stuff ten tactical pounds into a five-pound fishery.
Having read literally thousands of fish stories over my editing career, I tend to follow my own quest for “new” material down some pretty narrow, overgrown trails into a thicket of high-level technical rambling, then realize that what I’ve written will be of little use to more than a small handful of fishermen who probably aren’t reading the stuff anyway. I take as common knowledge fishing wisdom I only unearthed myself not so long ago, glossing over much of what the actual readers of magazines like this one might put to good use in the approaching season. Simplify, Zach. Simplify.
With that in mind, what follows is a brief list of no-frills, tire-meets-road ideas—most gathered from very sharp stripermen—that have delivered significant bumps to my own catch rate. No, spring schoolies are not cutting edge, state-of-the-art stuff, but they’re what we’ll be fishing for most immediately. And more importantly, the issues of timing and cold-water bass biology do make the first fresh-run stripers a bit trickier to catch consistently than the same size bass a couple months down the line. It’s simple but not braindead-simple.
Gearing Up
First job, if you’ve vowed to catch your first linesides of the year before the first week of May, is to dial in your gear to meet the exact demands of the fishing ahead. It’s beyond obvious that you’ll want to keep your gear proportional to the size of the first arrivals. The trend in recent seasons, in spring schoolies just as in bass generally, has been toward the upper ranges of the sub-legal striper spectrum—not the micro-dinks of yesteryear, but stocky 23- to 26-inchers that can present some problems if you’re trying to do the job with ultralight tackle in places involving uncertain footing or elevated casting perches.
What you’re after is a reasonably ballsy medium to medium-fast action stick in the 6 1/2- to 8-foot range—added length a plus when you have to lean into casts to reach out a ways into a stiff headwind. The fish are not notoriously gun-shy, so if you’ll be standing well above water, you may want the capability to run longer leaders of slightly heavier mono or fluoro leader for landing fish without landing in the emergency room after a slick-jetty header.
Simple Lures and Precision Rigging
There has been a ridiculous amount written about standard spring offers for fresh-run schoolies, but in the interest of a complete run-down, most small (3- to 5-inch), relatively narrow profile soft plastics (whether in-line swimbaits like Storms, Tsunamis, or swim-tail grubs or paddletail shad-bodies trailing plain leadheads or bucktails) will get the job done. Pearl, chartreuse, shad or bunker-pattern color schemes all work fine, with white the prevailing favorite. You can also experiment with hard-plastic crankbaits like Rapala X-Raps, Gag’s Mambo Minnows, or small Bombers, with the caveat that you should stick to suspending models, and should absolutely knock down barbs and consider replacing the rear mangler trebles with bucktail-dressed singles (some folks even snip off at least one of the three points on the forward hooks).
My preference, for several reasons, is to forego actual leaders in the interest of cutting down my personal tally of aquatic vegetation by eliminating all hardware. Instead, I’ll run a 7- or 8-foot topshot of 20- or 30-pound fluorocarbon connected to my 12-pound braid via a modified Albright knot. The leader material facilitates lifting fish when necessary, with the added bonus that the fluoro—as opposed to braid, tied direct—can help catch rate on fussier days.
Tides and Temps
The magic word in early bass is water temp—not necessarily the average daily surface temp along the oceanfront, but the micro-level fluctuations we see thanks to certain tidal and conditions variables. Like the worm-hatch fishing that ignites in May and June, you’re looking for the warmer days, mid-April to mid-May), and more specifically, the effects of solar-warmed estuarine water on out-front temps. According to the basics of chemistry (and physics, maybe—getting lightheaded, here…) a tide that peaks sometime between, say, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. will give water some time to warm in the sun up in the estuarine shallows through the warmest part of the day, then dump that warmer water seaward for the magic hours, late afternoon to sunset. Again, there’s no real consensus temp that puts the bite in gear; it’s more about relative warmth. Moderate south to SW wind—ideally a day or two of it in late April—is the odds-on favorite for most of the Matunuck spots early on, with the condition that too much southerly wind is also famous for carrying a bumper crop of brown weed right to market into the wash, Carpenters Bar to the West Wall.
The Cold Reality
Minor daily fluctuations notwithstanding, April schoolie fishing is still a cold-water affair, something to keep in mind when you’ve made enough fishless casts to end up in automaton mode: While fish can be quite aggressive some days, chasing even fast-moving baits, you should be conscious that your “retrieve hand” doesn’t have your trusty shad body ripping through the watery fore at 35 knots, throwing what looks like a nuclear sub wake from four feet below. When water’s brisk, fish—like those of us standing out in the gathering dusk courting a springtime case of walking pneumonia—remain a bit on the sluggish end of the seasonal spectrum. When in doubt, slow ‘er down a touch.
The First Better Ones
It’s still a bit over a month off, but bears at least a quick mention here that it’s usually the first or second week of May when reports of the first 30- or 34-pounder filter out through the usual channels. Unlike the mysterious 58-pounders the rumor mill lets loose on the threshold of December—the one someone’s friend’s uncle’s drinking buddy’s cousin caught on a quarter-ounce bucktail in some frigid backwater full of bilge oil either yesterday or three weeks ago—the mid-May thirties tend to be the real deal. Most years, these fish come out of Matunuck or the southern reaches of the Gansett bedrock, and 90 times out of 93, they’re taken on fresh squid the locals all use but don’t talk about in polite company. The guys catching them tend to be fishing lightly-weighted squid on conventional gear—the latter the best way to soft-peddle calamari to spring cows.
This is only relevant at this early stage of the budding season because you ought to keep a very close ear to the ground for any developments in the spring squid run, if only to get a jump on your bait acquisition work in preparation for your own first attempts to drag a May slob ashore.
It all seems a bit remote from the perspective of April Fools Day, but it never ceases to amaze me just how rapidly the days melt off the calendar this time of year: One day you’re waiting for news of the first bright fish at the West Wall, then you blink, look back at the calendar and flinch when you read “June” off the top of the page. Stay vigilant, get ready, and as soon as there’s a compelling reason, get going.
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