Soft Plastics and Big Stripers and the Radar Pier



36" striper caught on 10" hogy.



Biggest striper of the day at 37"

I got out last Saturday morning with Eric Harrison on Jamaica Bay. As a Hogy rep, Eric is a big soft plastics fisherman and has designed some hardware for Hogy for targeting striped bass around structure. He is the master at fishing soft plastics for big stripers and every fishing trip with him is like taking a PhD level class in fishing. Eric grew up fishing the coast of southern California and honed his skills in the big fish waters of Massachusetts fishing around Boston Harbor and catches as many trophy stripers as anyone on the coast.

So, I dedicated the day to fishing Hogy soft plastics with him. I picked his brain about using them for stripers and got an excellent tutorial on fishing the deep channels of Jamaica Bay with soft plastics. We fished the last three hours of the flood in area west of the railroad bridge to the ruined radar pier and had a slow pick of quality fish to 37". All of my fish were at least 30" and my largest was 36".

There was a slight WNW wind, that was a little higher than predicted. This WNW wind combined with an incoming tide gave us a good drift across some fairly productive water.

We had success pulling stripers out of bunker schools in 25' using 10" Hogys. The key was either marking or seeing bunker and fishing through them. Most of the time, we would be bumping bunker only to have our jig thumped hard by a big striper. When the bunker would disappear, the bite stopped. The bunker were moving around fast and the stripers were moving with them in hot pursuit. As such, we moved around quite a bit.

Retrieve was key to getting hit. For me, I let the jig fall to the bottom and worked it up - the odder the retrieve, the more hits I got. My best retrieve was a long haul with a few periodic hard twitches to keep it in the middle of the water column, away from the surface. During the pause between twitching the plug, I would often receive a violent hit from a striper. When the action was good, I was always hitting bunker. It was easy to tell the difference between bumping bunker and a striper hit.

We both caught fish by the radar pier, but the up-current side of the pier was the better producer. This surprised me because usually the bass hold at the down-current side of pilings. But, all of the bunker was on the up-current side of the pier as well.

The bite slowed as the top of the flood approached and the bunker spread out. The stripers also spread out, and we hardly marked any stripers moving through the channel at all on our journey back to the launch.  While the tide was incoming, we had periodic marks of stripers but very rarely were the stripers schooled up except for one occasion. Otherwise, we would mark a lone big striper moving through the middle of the water column. I saw one once that looked to be about 4'. It was the biggest mark I ever saw on my fishfinder.

Great fishing and it isn't even the peak yet.

We discovered that the bluefish are moving in. Eric had several plastics bitten off. I expect to see them in hordes next weekend.

Also, there were some weakfish caught by others. With some reports of weakfish in the area, I did a scoping mission on Sunday morning. I got a late start and fished for 90 minutes before the south wind came up and blew out the afternoon. No weakfish for me but I expect them to be in better numbers next weekend. I believe they are in there in numbers right now. I just have to find them. For the next three weeks, I'm likely dedicating one scouting mission per week until I find some.