The June New Moon. Dark nights, big tides, giant stripers. This week saw good stripers taken from Maryland to Maine, with a strong showing for surfcasters, who found big bass feeding within casting distance of the beach all throughout the Northeast.
The Striper Cup is underway! Sign up today, and we’ll ship out your Striper Cup box loaded with stickers, discount codes, a Rapala lure, and a fresh, new Columbia PFG shirt featuring an awesome hand-drawn striper design. And don’t forget to enter the Rapala Photo Contest, running this entire month.
Anglers fishing the ocean off Maryland are catching plenty of stripers (and red drum) but most of the fish continue to be outside their respective slot limits.
The run of big stripers in Delaware Bay has slowed to a trickle. Bigger bass are getting a big scarce in the southernmost part of New Jersey, but in the surf from Long Beach Island north, anglers continue to find 40-inch-plus stripers. Fish to 50 inches continue to be caught on eels and big metal lips in the northernmost part of the Jersey coast.
The central South Shore is on fire with massive fish feeding on bunker, as the biomass moves east.
There are really large bass in Long Island Sound, feeding both at night and during the day.
More bass are moving into Connecticut waters, with good schools setting up at places like the Gut. The fishing should really fire up within the next week.
The fishing in Rhode Island ratcheted up again this week, with a return of dense schools of bunker to the bay, and big stripers on them.
Plenty of stripers around Cape Cod, with many in the 10- to 25-pound range. A wave of larger fish moved through the Canal last weekend, while other schools of large fish have set up at Monomoy, the Outer Cape, and Cape Cod Bay.
Big bass are feeding well around the South and North Shores, both close to shore and farther off, where a few cow-sized stripers have given momentary thrills to anglers trolling squid bars for bluefin.
Bunker and mackerel are bringing bigger stripers into Northern New England.
