By Dave Anderson

​Let me start by saying that there is absolutely no way I can cover this subject in one post, I’m going to have to break this down into several parts—I could see it going as many as 10 individual parts, but we’ll see. Just to stay on trend with what we’ve been discussing recently, I am going to focus on deep presentations with plugs.
 
When I look at the blackfish footage in last week’s video I always come away with the same pointed thoughts in my mind; I see how tight they are to the bottom and how subtle their movements are (unless they’re moving frantically). I feel it’s important to stress the point that blackfish are only one of these ‘bottom species’ that double as reliable baitfish, and pretty much all of them stay tight to the bottom and tight to structure: scup, fluke, sea bass, choggies, kingfish, pollock—and I forgot to mention lobsters in my last post. Lobsters conjure—at least for me—images of the rich surfcasters of the 1800’s tossing lobster tails into the Cuttyhunk suds. And I have found numerous lobsters in the guts of the bass I have kept over the years. These crustaceans are active at night and absolutely are a favorite target of big striped bass.
 
Ok, hopefully I’ve made this infinitely clear: a deep presentation is a natural presentation in the boulder-strewn stretches of the Northeast coast that most of us fish. So that’s the first point: get comfortable with fishing deep. One of the best sentences I’ve ever read about fishing deep was written by my friend and elite surfcaster John Hanecak, it’s simple but so true: “You can’t be afraid to lose plugs, if you’re afraid you’re going to lose it, then you’re not going to fish it where you’re most likely to catch a big bass.” That’s paraphrased, but the point should be well taken. Which brings me to another quote from a YouTube video posted by swimbait pro Mike Gilbert, you think losing your $50 to $75 metal lip hurts, these guys are fishing baits that cost as much as $500! Mike takes a very pragmatic approach to it, he says, “Consider it gone. Once you cast it out there, you have to think of it as if you’ve already lost that bait.” Plugs are tools, and by the nature of what we do, they must be considered disposable. This is why I have backups of everything I like and why I build many multiples of the plugs I make for my personal stash. When they inevitably leave me, I have another to take its place.
 
So how do you know when you’re fishing deep enough? When you start banging into the bottom and hanging up periodically, you’re there. I currently only use metal lips and needles when I’m trying to dredge the bottom. And I am fully aware of the fact that there other ways to get this done, but shads, leadheads and bucktails don’t fit into the way I do it. I like to play on the buoyancy of the plug to keep my presentation natural.
 
Referring again to the underwater footage, notice how fluid their motions are and how often they really aren’t moving much at all. I can’t do that with a bucktail, I don’t doubt that someone out there can, but I can’t. I can do that with metal lip, especially one that’s weighted enough to slow its rise during a pause. I can also do this with a heavy needlefish, particularly those that are made to sink level. A properly made level-sink needle will not rapidly ascend through the water column like a conventionally made (tail-weighted) needle. It’s the riding angle of the plug that dictates it’s track, if the needle rides head above the tail, it will climb, if it stays level it will remain—more or less—at the depth you sink it to (until the line angle steepens to the point that it has to ride toward the surface).
 
Presenting these plugs is all about getting them to depth and then maintaining that depth while feeling your way through the retrieve. I’ll begin with the metal lip. Let’s assume that we’re fishing in 10 feet of water with a good sweep running from left to right. I’m going to cast out to about my 10 o’clock and put four or five hard cranks on the reel to get the plug down fast. Now I have a tight zone in which I can work the plug properly before the sweep begins to affect the action of the plug and its ability to stay deep—let’s say that’s from about the 10:30 position to the 1:30 position. When I have the plug down, I focus on a steady, subtle rhythm, I don’t want the plug to swim hard or to wobble out of control. Everything I do is dictated by what I feel and what I’m feeling is directly linked to the how the current is affecting the plug. My reactions are all made to maintain that slow, thumping rhythm. But with some mental footage of bottom species swimming in my head, I will also allow the current to move the plug while I stop cranking and lower the tip to cease the wobble and swing a stationary target through the tide. If I’m doing it right, I will bump bottom here and there and that’s another time when I’ll pause the plug, allowing it to swing and float over the obstacle before resuming the retrieve. To me, this method closely resembles what I see in those videos. Am I overthinking this? I really don’t know. But it helps me stay alert and confident, so regardless of its necessity underwater, it has a positive effect on me and therefore it has a positive effect on my fishing.
 
With the needle the basics are very much the same, except I often find that I have to make a few ‘test casts’ to find the perfect cast placement so that I can get it down in time to fish in that slice of bottom where the current works in our favor. A perfect cast would have the needle hitting the bottom at about the 11 o’clock position. Once again, the retrieve is completely based on feel and I make several casts every night where something seems to go wrong, the plug never gets all the way down or—for some reason—swings harder and I never really connect. But, on that same plane, when it does work properly the feeling is 100% different. I can feel the weight of the plug and how the current is playing off of it. I keep my rod tip high and when I feel like I’ve lifted it too far from the bottom, I drop the tip sharply, allowing a loop of slack in the line which the weight of the needle quickly takes up, sinking it back down a few feet. Here again, the goal is to tick bottom once in a while, keeping the plug in the lower 2- to 3-feet of the water column, swinging right through the strike zone. The hits are THUNDEROUS using either method.

This morning, we have another video for you about switching rear hooks to our worm-weight system. This time around, we're going to give you a few more thoughts, tips, and philosophy surrounding our commitment to ditching the rear hook entirely.

So far this season we've had fish to 17 pounds using this system. We'll have LOTS more content related to it as the season progresses.

If you missed it, you can find the first full video (all 20 minutes of it) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09ByNzVOR0Y&t=26s

And, we have a TOURNAMENT GIVE AWAY, going on as well if you missed that: ​https://www.facebook.com/OutflowFishing/photos/a.1154793617982026/2036050029856376/?type=3&theater

By Jerry Audet

As you'll hear in this post, I'm not always the bravest surf fisherman out there. Although, some might actually call me "smart" or "cautious". I feel that given the short-comings of the fly rod, I need to figure out ways to get myself as close as possible to areas where big fish are known to "hang out". As I put rather strongly in this video, casting distance is always an issue with the fly rod, and to overcome this I need to swim further. While I swim rather regularly (3-4 days a week) for short distances with my plugging rod, I have yet to undertake the kind of swims I'm talking about in this video.

And let's face it, swimming at night in the ocean in any kind of current is pretty "exciting". Or, nerve-wracking, depending on your point of view.

In this video, I'll talk to you about a lot of things, but primarily my surf belt and the limited gear I'll be taking with me on my long swim. Enjoy!

By Dave Anderson

We are conditioned to think to certain things as baitfish. We can't help it, it comes at us from all angles, reading, watching videos, attending seminars... we hear the same things; bunker, mackerel, sea herring, sand eels, peanuts... having these terms jammed down our collective throats has built up a wall of sorts, it has created a profile of baitfish that is now pretty much a forgone conclusion--it's like we already know what they eat and they don't eat anything else. 

Well, you can toss that right out the third floor window. 

Big fish are focused on sustaining themselves and survival. It is a fact that they are opportunistic, so yes they will absolutely feed on herring, bunker, mackerel, squid and anything else that happens to cross their paths, but those baits can't be relied upon to sustain them on a daily/nightly basis. So the things that are always present become the most common menu items--these are the things that the worm-soakers and the crab-dunkers are catching; scup, fluke, choggies, sea bass and--most importantly--blackfish. Blackfish are abundant, they are territorial and they are reliable. And I believe that tog in the 8- to 16-inch class are the top sustaining 'baitfish' that trophy stripers in southern New England feed on. Redefine bait and think about reliability--when you focus on what's reliable you take luck out of the equation, and that puts you on a faster track to getting that big fish.

By Dave Anderson

The term 'water environment' was coined by my friend John Lee, he used to single out the effects the water and water movement have on his most productive dive spots. Moving water plays a big role in making one spot stand out from others nearby. But it's not always that boiling tide-rip that should be getting all your attention. Thinking in terms of the entire food chain and how increases in current speed or changes in the direction of the flow can affect the feed, starting at the microscopic level, really is the baseline for singling out hot zones where big fish are likely to make regular stops. When the water speeds up in a focused area, it kicks up tiny organisms that feed slightly larger organisms and the chain reaction sets off from there. Don't start yourself off half blind by only thinking about the fish you want to catch, look at your spots for what they offer a big fish and assess from there. 

The striped bass is, at the moment, over-fished. It's clear now we have to all do our part to help protect this beloved fish for future generations. In lieu of this information, we have put together a solution to let the saltwater angler modify any lure to work with only 1 front treble hook. We believe this is important for several reasons, which we have detailed in the video.  However, we also want the lure to work precisely as designed- and continue to catch as many fish as possible. So, in this short film, we detail how to use small "bullet" or "worm" weights to keep all plugs working as originally designed; while at the same time being better for the fish, easier on the angler, and allowing you to carry more lures in your bag.

Please share with your fellow angler, and lets do our part to help this fish return to abundance.

Look for an extended epilogue for this video to come in the next couple weeks with more information and discussion!

By Dave Anderson

There are probably 8-million ways to lose a big fish, but nothing hurts more than losing them at endgame. I have one particular painful experience that happened in the Canal about nine or 10 years ago. The tide had just turned east and it was late-May and I was throwing a pink mackerel Guppy pencil popper. The fish hit way out at the end of the cast and I knew, instantly, that it was big. She made two good runs and I was lucky that the tide was slow or else I don’t think I would have had much of a chance of even coming close to landing her. Finally I had her close, and she made a wide circle around my position on the shore. I could feel my heart beginning to race a little as she sounded and laid on her side, to this day I feel confident saying she was at least very close to 50 if not over. She was all of 50 inches and built like Magnus Ver Magnusson, as she glided toward me, I stepped into the water so I wouldn’t have to strain any of my tackle trying to drag her onto the rocks. I could see that the fish was only hooked on one hook point and it wasn’t exactly a rock solid connection, but I didn’t panic. I had her coming in, the line was tight, the plug was visible, she was barely a rod length off the tip and appeared to have given up. Then she rolled over and tried to turn to dive. She disappeared for a minute and then… the pencil, unceremoniously, popped up in the widening rings of her last splash. Gone. I was so crestfallen that I called my fishing partner at 5:45 a.m. when he was away on a family vacation to Florida. Given the fact that he was going to Disney that day, and most certainly would have preferred dental surgery, never mind fishing a hot tide at the Canal, he didn’t provide the type of sympathy I was hoping for.
 
So much has to go right before you even get the chance to screw up the landing, and because of this, we don’t get enough opportunities to practice landing giants in the surf. This is where so many hearts are broken. And too many of them break as a result of complete panic. I once took my aunt, Betsy, on a fishing trip aboard a friends boat in the Housatonic River. We were catching stripers in December and as the morning turned to afternoon, the bite cooled off. I think Besty kind of tuned out for a bit and was just, kind of, dangling her small soft plastic over the side while daydreaming when her rod went down with authority. This fish put on a real show, ripping drag, staying deep and really putting her to the test. Then the fish surfaced, it was not a striped bass, it was an Atlantic salmon! Betsy totally lost her shit! She actually dropped the rod and practically dove over the side, for a split second, I thought I was going to have to grab her ankles! I insisted that she CALM DOWN, grab the rod and let me land the fish, which, luckily, we were able to do.
 
So, how do you prepare for this moment? If you haven’t—yet—landed what you consider to be a real giant, (and just to be clear, there is no cut-and-dried definition of ‘giant’ here) then let me just tell you now, it’s not likely to be a ho-hum moment, unless you’re heavily medicated at the time. Big fish, look HUGE when you compare them to the average catches that all surfmen make on a typical night. And if that doesn’t get your heart racing, then… why the hell are you doing this? This factor is only multiplied when the fish is caught in full dark, and only comes into view when it glides into the halo of your light.
 
This may sound like the musings of a person who has totally lost touch with reality, priority and what really matters, but when the season gets close I use visualization to prepare myself for that first big one of the season. For the sake of the exercise, start by stretching a tape measure out to 50 inches and look at it, I mean really LOOK, now imagine the width and girth and power of a fish that size. Now imagine the mouth of that fish, the eye, the gills and then remember that it will be alive and pissed off when you reach for that jaw to land the fish. This is the moment that so many people botch, because they are not mentally prepared.

By Dave Anderson

For this week's installment of my 'Pursuing 50' series, I'm talking about the concept of chasing the ghost. The ghost is the fish, but not just any fish, it's THE FISH, it's that biggest fish of the year or your lifetime. I have found a lot of valuing in 'dumbing it down' to chasing one singular entity, rather than trying to catch one of the thousands of giant bass in the ocean, I focus on the fact that I'm really only trying to catch one. This has helped me see the difference between the general act of fishing and hunting for a trophy--hunting is selective and it means that I'm able to focus on that one big fish. Making the switch to hunting big fish is largely based in your mindset, I think this concept will help you get there. Hopefully I'm right.