Striped Bass Update for the Kennebec River, Maine
June 20, 2012
Striper fishing in the Kennebec is getting back on track after the awful weather earlier this month, but it is still up and down. The River is slowly cleaning itself, but it is taking its sweet time. The water is stained (still) and towards the bottom of the ebb tide it looks like coffee milk. Sight casting is still limited to early morning or evening, when the stripers are waking in the surface. You just can't see down into the water at any distance, even from my perch up on the poling platform.
The herring in all sizes are everywhere, as they should be in mid June. I have seen bass chasing small bait such as sand eels up river from the mouth almost to Bath. Sometimes, these fish have been fussy, even when chasing the bait to the surface.
The striped bass that my dad is holding in this photo came out of two feet of water on Monday morning. We searched for the first hour of the morning with no results and then found happy fish slurping bait right at the bottom of the tide. The wind stayed down, allowing us to follow the fish up onto a big flat as the water started to rise. Unlike other pods of breaking fish that I've seen in the past week, these were mixed in size from small schoolies to ones about 28 or 29 inches. We went back out Monday evening to see if the pattern would repeat itself. The wind was up out of the south and the tide was running well, but we found nothing.
The weather change seemed to really turn on fish this morning. Second cast into a current seam past a ledge and bam, fish on. Next location, schoolies going nuts on the surface. Third stop, nada, but fourth stop was on again. This continued for the first couple hours until the tide died out. I thought for sure that I'd start to see fish working up onto the flats as the tide started to rise but they were stealthy and given the lack of water clarity, had to really prospect for them.
I was hoping for three or four days of southwest wind, but the wind forecast is all over the place. This strech of hot, humid weather isn't ideal for my wife's project of moving a dismantled chimney but might be just perfect for the striper fishing.
Capt. Peter Fallon
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