The striped bass have arrived and Billy Edgar is the first of my Saltwater fishing buds to catch one. Wait a minute, not just one, he got 3 in about an hour. The ocean is still cool, so the striped bass are favoring the warmer salt water marshes. Anyone who lives in Southern Maine knows that there are marsh lands everywhere. Billy, Steve and I started out at one of our marsh holes but nothing was happening. We called one of our buddies who had gotten 11 fish the night before and he told us we were in the wrong spot. So we hit another spot and we found the fish. The tide was coming in and it was approaching slack tide. Fish were rising and they were definately schooled up and on the smaller side. Hey, that’s why they call em schoolies. Bill-e outfished me fair and square. There I was throwing out double haul casts like a pro and standing only a few feet from Bill-e. He hooks into the first one, and I consider it lucky. He hooks into a second one and I think, “Well it must be the fly.” He gives me a fly that was pretty much the same color and then he hooks into his 3rd fish. Not even a tug for me. Of course, I got hung up on the bottom for a second and told everyone that I had a hit. Hey, I was a desperate man. We were both using sinking line, fishing the same water and using the same flies. So, tonight, Bill-e simply outfished me. No bones about it. Funny how that goes, especially with striper fishing. Some nights your hot and other nights your not. In all seriousness, it was great to see Bill-e get into the fish. He loves the striper fishing, and has been looking forward to the Maine Striper Nights since January. There is a group of 7 or 8 guys down here that have come together only because of the Striped Bass fishing. Even if we did not want to see each other we would because we all love the salt water striper fishing. Invevitably, we end up seeing each other on an almost nightly basis. Sometimes we are on the sandbars, sometimes the marshes, sometimes the rocks and sometimes on the beach. We rarely make plans. We all just seem to end up at the same place night after night and/or early in the mornings. It’s great to be starting up another striper season, getting into some striped bass and meeting up with old and new striper buds as we all come out of the woodwork.
