“That’s not our lunch coming down the stairs. What the hell is he carrying?” The recently inducted member was carrying what looked like an alternative-styled toolbox made of shiny plastic, which was a novelty in that era of metal and wooden tackle boxes. It definitely wasn’t a lunch pail, and when he stopped at the workbench and opened it, I held my breath. I had seen numerous lures, primarily freshwater artificials in the huge display case at Cornell’s Sporting Goods, but it appeared this angler had recently bought them all. It was the first time that I had heard of anyone striper fishing with spoons.
The vast majority of the club fished with bait, with the most productive lures being the Cape Cod and Niantic Bay spinners trailed by two hand-excavated seaworms. Two of the older gents built what was referred to as the beads and blades. These consisted of half-inch colored beads strung on linen and, eventually, mono line. There was a small chrome blade every six beads, depending on the length from the connecting main line loop to the 6/0 or 7/0 hook at the business end, where the worm was carefully threaded on to allow it to swim naturally. Those hand-brewed enticements were much sturdier than the Cape Cod or Niantic Bays, which tended to open up under pressure from a determined teen-sized (or larger) striper.
This gent was obviously not a worm or bait fisherman; he trolled lures, many of them larger-sized ones that were popular for largemouth bass at the time. The club’s caretaker called them wobble spoons and said he once saw a man jigging one from the deck of the bridge, 32 feet above the high-water mark. He noted that the angler had two school bass of about four pounds protruding from the burlap bag alongside him. The new member had a white and green fiberglass rod with a late-model Penn level-wind reel filled with newly spooled white linen line.
Most of the places we fished were rather shallow. Our spinners and beads were light and able to move through the water column without hitting the bottom and picking up weeds. However, the spoon man seldom fished those shallow areas, preferring to troll alongside and under the bridges with his reliable and very quiet 4.5 Evinrude outboard. I had already learned that it was not how fast you went but how silently and dependably, as many of the outboards of that day were fickle and would not idle down slowly enough to troll without flooding out or coughing up a smoke cloud.
At that entry-level phase of my fishing career, the term and understanding of “structure” was not in my awareness or vocabulary. I surf-fished and trolled the shoreline rocks because that was where my mentors were catching stripers at a time when a 16-inch fish with no bag limit was the law. The spoon angler almost always fished structure in the form of bridges, breakwaters, and manmade piers where bass hid and foraged in the pilings and discarded slabs of broken granite that provided additional cover along the bottom.
One afternoon, I was heading up the boathouse stairs as the spoon man was arriving. He noticed my cardboard errand box and asked if I would get him a coffee and a sandwich. He also suggested I get something for myself. It was quiet at the club, and while we were consuming our lunch, he asked if I would like to join him and show him a few of the spots where I had caught bass with other members. It was difficult restraining my excitement. I gulped down my milk and pastry, then retrieved my rod and a container of sand worms in damp seaweed from the caretaker’s locker. I had seven or eight worms but figured that was enough because I was really interested in learning more about the spoons. The traditional inshore spots were fairly shallow, and I caught two legal schoolies while my new friend hung up twice and lost one of his spoons.
We quit trolling and he began drifting his chrome Accetta Pet Spoon along the middle of the channel at the center span, catching a five-pound striper almost immediately. My jaw was on my chest as he caught several more bass, but lost two more spoons on the cables and foul bottom that created a spider web of broken fishing lines under the structure. We then moved to the few deeper holes along the state piers where the ships docked, where he caught the first teen-sized striper and lost another of similar size. Those were the largest stripers I had seen extracted from that area. We left just before sunset since he was down to his last Accetta pet spoon. That trip was quite a revelation.
Today, spoon fishing has seen a revived interest, particularly the flutter spoon technique that has taken numerous large stripers over the past few seasons. Suddenly, it seemed that a few anglers began taking credit for the “discovery” of fishing with spoons. Not so. It’s been going on in fresh water for ages and in the salt for well over 70 or more years, according to my personal recollections.
Sometime in the early 1960s, I was selling a mixed bag of fish at a New Bedford waterfront dealer when an elderly gentleman, dressed in a three-piece suit and looking out of place in that wet and malodourous loading dock, approached me. He had such a genuine air about him that when he asked me where my catch came from, I told him they were caught less than five miles from where we were standing. He smiled and told me he owned a 23-foot bass boat, but as a doctor, he didn’t have the time to continue making long runs to Cuttyhunk. He said he would be happy to pay me to show him a few spots closer to his slip at the Concordia boat yard in nearby Padanaram village. He invited me to lunch at a nearby eatery, where we made plans to meet at his boat the following Wednesday afternoon. I explained that he would be putting us at a disadvantage by starting so late in the day, but his offer was so generous that I agreed. I brought two tube-and-worm rods and two dozen trolling worms. The doc had two custom rods with a pair of like-new Penn 3/0 Senators, each with a bright chrome Luhr Jensen spoon attached to the reel’s chrome bars. I took him to the ledge where those fish had come from—a boulder field with a high spot that might tickle the bottom of the skeg that protected his prop and shaft on the dropping tide. I suggested he shorten his line and point his rod tip higher to keep his spoon above the numerous rocks scattered throughout this area. I had barely paid out three colors of lead line and locked up when I began getting hits. It wasn’t the solid hook-up of a head-striking striper but the tail-docking snips of a bluefish that chewed all but the head of the worm, stopping just short of the barb.
I instructed the doc to crank in a few more feet of line as I went around the big ledge. As soon as I began to circle it, he had a jolting strike that resulted in line tearing off his reel. I turned the boat into deeper water while he fought the husky blue that made several head-shaking jumps before he brought it within range of my long, deadly gaff. He was smiling from ear to ear and said he had a patient who made the best smoked bluefish pate he had ever tasted. That bluefish came up and bit the end of that spoon and was solidly hooked on the large single hook at the business end of the glimmering lure. After a dozen passes, I managed one blue and a legal 30-inch striper on my tube while the doc caught a half-dozen blues and a 15-pound bass that engulfed the spoon up to the forward split ring. Over lunch, he talked me into taking his boat to Cuttyhunk at a later date, when I showed him where to drift and jig inside the deeper waters of Quicks Hole and the strong tidal currents between Nashawena and Naushon Island outside Robinsons. The doc caught a 31-pound bass on a 7-inch Sea Devil spoon. I knew that Sow and Pigs was too shallow for trolling spoons, but on a low tide, casting them into the west-running rip at the Dry Pigs produced some great action. On our first trip to the islands, I moved over to Devils Bridge, where we trolled two of my heavy bunker spoons on wire line and caught three more stripers before the tide let go and the bite died.
The doctor was so pleased that he became my friend for life. During the “Wild West” days of the early charter and party-boat fishing off Jersey, some of those boats, drifting with Ava and Crocodile jigs, put as many as 200 bass on deck in the course of a night. My friend. Nick, an old-school waterman, charter skipper, and angling historian told me about a New Jersey captain named Whitey Morantz, skipper of the Miss-Take II out of Highlands, New Jersey. Morantz began fishing spoons such as the 7-inch Luhr Jenson Crocodile well over 50 years ago. It appears he avoided using much in the way of bait, wire lines, and trolling or casting because his methods primarily involved drifting and jigging. That boat usually carried a full complement of anglers because Captain Whitey had his spoon-jigging operation down to a deadly science. His methods were simple and successful, but I wonder if he ever used scent, as in bunker or herring.
Back in the 1960s, the Russelure was the worst-kept secret on Cuttyhunk island. In fact, Charlie Cinto and Russ Keane—regular fares of competing captains, Charlie Hague and Frank Sabatowski— were warned never to divulge where they fished or what they were using. Hague threatened them with expulsion if they ever shared any information about his lures and methods. Every time those two boats passed in the night, Cinto and Keane would pull their foul-weather hoods over their faces and look the other way. The reality was that both captains were using Russelures with great success and getting more fish to the boats than pulling the larger, heavier eel-skin plugs that provided stripers much more leverage for scrubbing off a lure.
It was Captain Roland Coulombe who gave me my first Russelure. They were difficult to come by in 1960, and that lure was a veteran of many battles on the rocks and rips of Sow and Pigs reef. The lures were made and introduced in the US in 1947, and while we don’t know who brought the first ones to Cuttyhunk, I am certainly glad they did. I put new hooks on mine, and usually had a fresh-killed herring or pogy to rub on the lure before I deployed it. I fished that lure from Westport to Jamestown with great success and still carry a few on my boat to this very day.
What worked in the 1960s hasn’t lost any of its magic 63 years later. In the spring of 2023, the Russell lure out-fished live bait on numerous occasions as sharpies were live-lining or trolling live bunker around huge schools of pogies. That day, the air was thick with the pungent scent of pogies holding in a balled-up safety pattern as over-nourished stripers rested below and alongside them. The splashes and crashes of feeding stripers were absent because they had taken up a holding pattern. The screen on our Humminbird Helix 12 marked those targets at various depths all around one particularly large school. I waited for the fisherman to move off before I removed a tube and snapped a chrome Russelure on the 15-foot fluorocarbon leader and began a pass around the pod of baitfish. Keeping the shadow of the boat and the prop wash away from the center of the bait, the lure was slammed as soon as I began to make a turn. That late afternoon, I released three fish from 20 to 25 pounds with a twist of my pliers. I am confident that throbbing and shimmering lure did not induce their hunger, but it played to their natural instincts to attack any animated object that invaded their space. The stripers that assaulted that lure were far from hungry, and two of them were followed to the boat by cohorts that had been similarly provoked. Russell lures have since gone on to become a hot item for big-game kingfish tournaments off the Louisiana coastline and neighboring waters.
Some fishermen might not believe that stripers would ignore live pogies, but they do, particularly when they have gorged and there are several large schools all around them to snack on. Today, there is a wide selection of spoons on the market, from the Little Cleos and Krocodiles to the high-yellow Tsunami flutter spoons and dozens more in between. Don’t forget to remain in touch with your spoons because stripers have an affinity for grabbing them on the drop. Spoons caught stripers in the 1960s and well before, and bass are still smacking them today.
By Brian Weiss
In recent years, a “new” lure has taken the striped bass fishery by storm, a type of super-sized metal spoon called the flutter spoon.
These lures first became popular in freshwater bass fishing as a way to imitate extra-large baitfish like gizzard shad. Their reflective metal and erratic action were a deadly tactic for jumbo largemouth bass.
As word got out, this lure made its way into the striped-bass world. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Northeast tackle shop that doesn’t carry flutter spoons.
A flutter spoon is a perfect representation of one of the striper’s favorite food sources, adult menhaden. Besides the profile and alluring glimmer of light cast off the spoon, the action is what really makes this bait shine. Due to the wide profile and weight distribution, a flutter spoon has a wildly erratic motion in the water, both as it swims and as it falls. This movement is what triggers a reaction strike from nearby bass. While I have caught fish by simply retrieving the spoon, jigging it is the most productive method.
Let it Free-Fall for the Best Action
When you sweep the spoon, it wobbles and shimmers as it darts upward. On the way down, without tension on the line, it will fall erratically in various directions, like a falling leaf. This is when you will get the majority of bites, feeling the bass as you lift the rod for the next sweep.
Let it Scope when Bass are Picky
Jigging and retrieving a flutter spoon with scope in the line will change the falling action of the spoon due to added resistance from your line. The spoon will no longer fall as erratically; instead, it will sink tail first at an angle and wobble side to side. This allows the fish more time to eat it on the descent as opposed to aggressively chasing it down. It can be very effective when the fish are a little pickier and aren’t stacked up beneath you.
Try it on the Troll
If you are unable to pinpoint a concentrated school of bait or bass, a flutter spoon is a great search bait. One day last spring, my friend Geoff and I were fishing a location that had been hot all week, with large masses of bunker coming and going with the tide. We knew there were fish in the area but were not able to identify a consistent feeding zone. After we gave up jigging and casting our spoons, we decided to search around for fish. As we pedaled our kayaks around, we sent our spoons back behind our kayaks and jigged them along the way. We were both able to hook and land several bass while on the move, which helped us eventually find an area with consistent action, so we stopped trolling and started jigging.
Fish it Shallow
From a boat, I have not had much success jigging flutter spoons any shallower than 10 feet of water. I believe both the sound from the boat as well as the size of its shadow spook the fish. However, I have caught fish jigging flutter spoons from a kayak in water as shallow as 5 feet. An angry bass hooked below you in 5 feet of water can be as exciting as it gets in a kayak. Hooking one so close to the boat can bring amazing visual action as well as some challenging angler maneuvers to avoid losing the fish. When you find fish in shallower water, don’t overlook the spoon.
Fishing Flutter Spoons for Striped Bass
