Herring Ho! (Maybe an Alewife?)

Fishing at night with live eels, beautiful calm night, plenty of moonlight not a cloud in the sky. Got into some nice fish, lost a couple but was able to land these two. One at 43” the other at 30”, both released safely. Revived the bigger gal for a few minutes til she kicked and swam off nicely.

Nick

Was out last night on my buddies boat at 9pm, just heading in now at 10:30am, got 20+ commercial sized fish on eels, schools were thick.

Nick

(Now I feel old Nick. You guys were 13.5 hours overnight on the water? My heroes. – Stickman)

I’ve been out by boat at 5am the last two mornings on the Merrimack during the last three hours of incoming tide. Plenty of bird and schoolie topwater activity. One fish coughed up this herring (or Alewife?) next to the boat. Exactly the size of a Heddon Super Spook, pretty much my favorite plug. You can see I only run a single hook on the butt end of the Spook. Used to be a feather on it too. Yeah, I lose plenty of hits, but I got tired of untangling three trebles from a fish.

The birds and surface pops slowed down a bit, so I switched to the Sluggo with a jig head. It’s been a long, long time since I fished this setup. In fact, the one that caught the big fish was a cut down Sluggo that I rigged about 4 years ago and has sat in a baggie till today. That offering brought in a few larger schoolies. I guess a some fatter stripers were hanging on the outskirts of the splashing fish.

Quite a fight on the large linesider. I was using very lightweight gear, 10lb. test too, allowing me to fling these light lures pretty far. My reel was set to handle small fish, so I was outgunned with this girl. That made the fight time a little long. Must have tired the fish. I try to move quick when releasing. Didn’t take time to measure the length. Photographed in about 20 seconds, and revived boat side before scooting off back into the channel. My arms are 36″ long, and the fish was right up against my belly, so the bass looks to be a bit bigger than an arms-length.

Stickman