You may need to wade out to them sometimes, but sand eels love sand flats where soft sand and some soil are mixed. ![]() However, it is also common for sand flats to come alive with blues during the last couple of hours of the ebb tide. So, choose your favorite access point and look for rips over shell beds and sand bars, and currents at creek and river mouths as some of the best spots to find blues. It helps if there’s at least some current, because it makes feeding easier. These marauding blues aren’t found everywhere at the same time, but will appear more often where sand eel schools are consistently found. I suggest a 9-foot outfit just in case a bigger blue like this one gets in on the action. However, in lean sand eel years the blues typically appear more often at first light for about an hour and then at twilight. ![]() In years when sand eel schools are numerous and dense, raids of small blues along the beaches can occur, off and on, all day long. Usually, schools of small (1- to 3-pound) blues arrive sometime in June and begin attacking the sand eels. However, as long as there are some sand eels in the Sound a repeating pattern allows surf anglers along the north shore to enjoy bluefish at least small blues, through July and sometimes into August. Therefore, the blues and bass can simply switch from one food to another and do not abandon the shallows to find food. By the time the sand eels retreat to deeper water there are usually large schools of 3/4- and 1-inch peanut bunker. What happens when there’s lots of sand eels in spring? As I’ve already noted, sand eels hold large schools of stripers and blues in our shallow waters well into the summer. This is precisely what happen in 2017, and accounts for why fishing along north shore beaches was spotty and catch numbers generally small for larger stripers and blues. The result is that large schools of stripers and blues will migrate through our waters quickly and go north, leaving only scattered groups of predators in our waters. The rest of the fish will leave prematurely in search of abundant food in the waters along the Rhode Island and Massachusetts coasts. However, if sand eels are not abundant by late May, only limited numbers of the above mentioned four marine critters will be present. At this point sand eels retreat into deeper parts of the Sound as well as out of the south shore bays and into the near ocean. When 2- to 4-inch sand eels are abundant in the spring they draw in squid, fluke, stripers and blues and hold them until water temps warm in early July. The annual year class of sand eels sets up the entire year for surf fishermen in Long Island Sound. Perhaps I’ll discuss this in an ocean piece down the line, but for now let’s focus on the north shore. Don’t confuse this with large adult ocean sand eels whose abundance is not only linked to the magnitude of annual year classes, but other factors, too. The abundance of sand eels, like so many fish species, is cyclical and we’ve been in a down part of the cycle since the early 2000s. In recent years, sand eel year classes have been poor to fair, and explains in part why north shore surf success has been limited. Many surf rats don’t appreciate how much a successful surf fishing season hinges on the size of the annual sand eel year class. ![]() In summer, stripers may be a bit reclusive, but schools of small blues frequently please. Instead, some anglers prefer to search the beaches mostly by day in search of whatever Mother Nature has decided to send our way, and most of the time that means small blues and stripers. However, for many of us, the cost in lost sleep and family friction is too high. This strategy requires patience and discipline as well as a commitment of hours. Some sharpies work late night tides in harbors searching for out-sized stripers that move in from daytime deep-water haunts in search of bunker and small porgies. School stripers are more likely to be caught at the mouths of harbors mixed with small blues.ĭuring the dog days of summer, stripers may be a bit reclusive, but schools of small blues are often ready to please.Īfter what, you ask? Well, after the May run of south shore blues, and after the May-June run of stripers on the north shore (we hope), what next? There are two ways to look at this problem.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |