| The weather last mid-week eased off enough to get out and enjoy the early run of stripers in our area. The Little River mud flat at Nichols, the Essex at Greenbelt and the Joppa flats on the Merrimack are producing some real good numbers and a wide variety of year class fish. The Shad run has finally begun with good numbers of bucks and hens running upstream. However, the major flooding that is occurring will for sure have a major impact on the run. I am not sure how significant the impact will be, but we will watch it closely. The Merrimack may take a week to 10 days to return to anything normal concerning flow and color. The smaller river systems will return to normal more quickly so I believe we will have a return to good fishing around Cape Ann later this week. Steve Papows, Porter and JB Bingle and I enjoyed some very good action last week on the Little. Steve found some excellent fishing on the Essex at Greenbelt as well. I personally caught some stripers as small as 10”, and a few as large as 26” on flies over last week. Porter reported upwards of 125 fish on his rod alone over three days on the Little River mud flat. His brother JB also reported a sizable number of stripers on his rod. Both anglers were using spinning gear tipped with a 4 inch Fin-S-soft bait, oil brown color with an unpainted 1/16 oz lead head. They fished Wednesday thru Friday from about 3 hours down to an hour and a half on the rising tide. Water temps measured 50+ degrees and caught fish that ranged in size from 9-10” to 20+ inches. Most all fish had sea lice on their skin and all appeared very healthy.
|
