Merrimack/Plum Is

[soukupj]

I fished the Merrimack/Plum Is area on Saturday. Weather was overcast with occassional rain. wind from the SE at about 20. Too rough to fish the mouth or Joppa Flats. We hit fish crashing bait on the surface downstream of RT1 bridge just after high tide. don't know what they were chasing. caught a couple on shad and herring-colored jigs. Did better with plain white jigs. 6 or 8 boats eventually joined us but no one was hooking up consistently. My guess is that we were not "matching the hatch" closely enough. Blitz lasted about 1/2 hour. after that we had good luck fishing the shore of Carr Is/Deer Is with surface poppers. If you weren't on the surface, you weren't catching fish. You had to cast close to shore and retrieve towards deeper water to take fish. We totaled about 20 stripers between 16 and 24 inches. weather was miserable but the fishing was ok....should heat up quickly now.

[saxatilis]

Way to go! I hope things heat up like that on the Piscataqua soon!

[froderick]

I fished Plum Island from shore at the North end near the Coast Guard Station Saturday afternoon for the last half of the outgoing tide. I got the dope from Kay at Surfland and fished 1 oz jigs with rubber shads. It was my anniversary so my wife came along to try her hand. Once I got the cast and drift down and caught my first one, I instructed her and she caught four to my three in the next two hours. They were all in the twenties, up to 27". Almost everyone lined up along the shore was catching a few. Many were taken on sea worms and some on clams. Most were on white jigs of some sort. Some flyfishers had some luck out toward the jetty in the area of the sandbar. We even saw one guy wet wading with bare legs!

Etiquette was not in evidence. I had one guy step over my gear and stand in my footprints to fish while I was helping my wife land one a few feet down the shore.