12/9- the calm after the storm

[westonhar00]

Fished the upper Roanoke the day after the Mafia tournament. I saw one boat all day. Started right when the sun was coming over the horizon. Immediately turned a corner and saw birds everywhere, diving and all, and bait flipping like crazy. Immediately threw a fitec taped net on a deeper bait ball right in that area and brought up the first striper I’ve ever caught in a cast net, it was 29 inches and I was stunned. I caught a few gizzards in that net as well, but they were beat uppp!! And my net was beat up as well, I now have a striper head sized hole in my net. The weird thing is that I never felt the striper in the net while pulling it up. I would pay so much money to have a camera attached to my net on that throw and see how In the world it was able to pull that one off. After that I had a full spread of about 6” gizzards, and didn’t get a single hit on any of the boards. I had one downline off the front with a very small gizzard and as I was pulling in the other boards it went off. So I decided to rig all downlines with peanuts, and caught 2! The second one I caught was spitting up peanuts, so I think it was safe to say they wanted the smaller stuff where I was. Also caught one on a jig! My first one!

[drag4striper]

Thanks for the report.

I have been lucky a few times and dragged my planer boards through busting stripers, and have several boards get slammed at once.
It's a hoot.
A big ole flathead catfish can really booger up your cast net too.

[Yam]

Thanks for your report.

I catch stripers quite a bit in my nets, especially my taped net. I have netted 4 stripers in one throw after mistakenly identifying the big dots on my downscan as mongos. They definitely mess up a net. However, the horns on a catfish have some special ability to wrap around your mesh worse than a treble hook. I always thought catfish were my worst enemy for my nets. That was until my net found a Bullnose Stingray in the Bay. Luckily, you don't have to bring a stingray onto your boat, because their tails essentially have a poisonous hacksaw on them and as they release themselves from your net, they cut your mesh all the way down to the lead line. That's better than having to touch that thing and you are given back your net. But you will not be throwing it again until you spend a day fixing it.

Conclusion... Stripers ain't that bad.