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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.
2 Comments
Mike afiglioli
5/11/2019 10:28:00 am
What the bass feed on I'm sure is locale dependent. You probably won't find many tautog on the outer beaches of Cape Cod. Back 40 or 50 years ago when most bass were kept, I would always look at their stomach contents. I was surprised by the lack of the prevalent bait in their stomachs. I suppose this was due to them throwing up during the fight.. One baitfish that was almost always present in their stomachs were small flounder. Sometimes they were stacked up like pancakes in their stomachs.
Dave (author)
5/13/2019 04:40:45 pm
Mike, thanks for the comment and you're absolutely right about that. Tog would not be a prevalent baitfish on the sand beaches. What I hope comes through in the video is that we have to think beyond those classic baitfish if we want to target big ones in the current state of the fishery. Anything that can fit down their throats is fair game and the name of the game--at least as far as I'm concerned--is finding the local baitfish that you can count on to be 'in place' to keep those big bass coming back for more. Thanks for the comment and excellent insight. Leave a Reply. |
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