Right place at the right time...

[semperfish]

I was dinkin' around in a local creek, casting poppers to sunnies the other afternoon. Poppers kept sinking ( I think my fluro leader was actually dragging them under). I'm stripping the popper back in and WHAM....fish on! Where there's one schoolie, there's usually more so I went to a white Zonker with an indicator at +24" and it was Game On! Casting dead across or quartering down with quick 6" strips seemed to be the ticket. Lost count in the 1 hour flurry but I landed at least 14. All 8-9" schoolies. Lotta fun!

 

[delta_dog]

Nice guy!

 

[Mike]

Being that you list your location as Bucks Co, in my follow-up comment below I assume that you were fishing a trib to the Delaware. There are one or two relatively large year-classes of young, sub-legal stripers in the river system right now. They will show themselves in even greater numbers as the river warms over the next two weeks. I would not be surprised if all tidal tribs of moderate to large size will have good populations now through August or early September. The fish may even move a short distance into non-tidal water on the tribs and the tidal and non-tidal river will be full of them this summer, at least as far upstream as upper Bucks Co. I am curious from a fisheries manager's standpoint, did you find these fish in tidal or non-tidal water? Feel free to PM me.

 

[semperfish]

Well Mike, considering that it's for Fisheries Management info, I don't mind burning my spots... :-D ...just kidding. You are correct sir: I was fishing a tidal section of a Delaware trib.

 

[Mike]

Thanks Semperfish; that's all I needed to know. The specific stream was not important to me. A number of tidal sections of tribs from the Delaware state line up to Trenton Falls are likely to support substantial numbers of these fish this year. Finding them in the non-tidal segments of these streams would have been very interesting, although it is also interesting that these fish have shown up already in Bucks Co tribs. We were not seeing many from these year classes while electrofishing the main tidal river last week from Marcus Hook to Tacony-Palmyra Bridge, but more and more adults are moving into the shallows and spawning has already been completed by a relatively small percentage of the females. Others are not even close to being ready.