Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Stillwater striped bass take a fly on the pause. Fish short three to six inch strips followed by a two to three second pause counted in Mississippis, and roughly ninety percent of eats come while the fly is sitting still. The angler who does not pause long enough is the one who does not hook up.
Henry Cowen is a striped bass guide and author who fishes a large Southeastern reservoir and wrote a book of thirteen fly patterns for stripers and hybrids.
Also on Apple Podcasts · Spotify · YouTube
What rod, reel and lines does stillwater striped bass fishing need?
A nine-foot 8 or 9 weight saltwater-style rod is the ideal starting point for stripers, which average five to twelve pounds across the country. A 7 weight is more fun for hybrids, which typically run one to six pounds. The reel only needs a good drag and 150 yards of backing - stripers run hard but tend to take a hundred feet of backing rather than a hundred yards.
Why carry two outfits instead of one on a lake?
On a river one rod will do, but a lake needs two: a slow-sinking intermediate on one and a fast sinker on the other. When fish are on top or feeding down to five to seven feet, the intermediate does everything. When they go secretive and sit ten to twenty-five feet down, only a fast sinking line reaches them, and there is no time to change spools when that happens.
What leaders and knots go on each line?
On the intermediate, a seven-foot leader to roughly 16 pound tippet, fluorocarbon or mono. On the fast sinking line, a straight five-foot piece of 20 pound - heavier than strictly necessary, because sinking lines often mean fishing near trees and pulling a fish out of one. Both get a loop knot at the fly so the pattern swims freely on the pause.
Which three flies can't you fish stripers without?
A Clouser Minnow comes first, because it takes more fish worldwide than any other pattern and stripers and hybrids are no exception. Second is a Game Changer. Third is a fly imitating a two-inch threadfin shad, because fish keyed on one-and-a-half to two-inch shad are, by Lefty Kreh's account, the hardest thing in fly fishing. For surface work, a gurgler, a crease fly or a walk-the-dog slider covers it.
Why throw an intermediate line at fish busting the surface?
This is the mistake most anglers make in November and December. When stripers are on juvenile threadfin shad, the bait sits one to three feet under the surface. The fish comes up from below, takes a mouthful and kicks its tail to go back down, and the boil you see on the surface is that tail kick - the fish has already eaten. An intermediate line thrown to those fish simply catches more of them than a topwater fly.
How do you count a sinking line down to fish you can see on the sounder?
The sonar screen showing solid streaks of fish at twenty-five feet is what the countdown is for. Those sinking lines drop about six inches per second, which is one foot every two seconds, so the count is simply double the depth in feet: forty seconds for fish holding at twenty feet, twenty seconds for fish at ten. That puts the fly in the school before the retrieve even starts.
What lake structure holds striped bass?
Points are the number one structure - the pieces of land on either side of a cove mouth. Humps come second, and the important part of a hump is the brush pile on it: a hump can cover the area of a baseball infield, so idle over it at three miles an hour when you are not fishing and mark the brush on GPS. Flats matter in spring as shallow water warms first. Saddles and blow-throughs, the shallow or deep bars running between an island and the shoreline, are the fourth.
Key takeaways
- Carry two outfits on a lake: a slow intermediate and a fast sinker, so you can fish the top seven feet or twenty-five feet down without swapping lines.
- Reels only need a good drag and 150 yards of backing; stripers take feet of backing, not hundreds of yards.
- Double the depth in feet to get your countdown in seconds, since these sinking lines drop roughly a foot every two seconds.
- Strip three to six inches quickly, then pause two to three full Mississippis - the eat comes on the pause about ninety percent of the time.
- Find the brush pile on a hump by idling over it at three miles an hour and marking it on GPS; that is where the fish sit.
- Keep a log of where you found fish and bait and where you did not, with the water temperature, and the seasonal pattern assembles itself.
