Short answer: neither, everywhere. Which tide fishes depends on what the water is doing at your spot. But a study that timed striped bass in marsh creeks found most of them at the hour the folklore writes off: in Delaware Bay, about 80 percent of the bass netted came around low water, on the last of the outgoing and the first of the incoming. So yes, you can catch striped bass at low tide. At a creek mouth it may be the best of it.
The usual advice runs the other way. Fish the first hours of the outgoing at a mouth; low tide is dead. The angling books hedge even on that. John Field writes that there is "no hard-and-fast rule for incoming or outgoing", and Nick Karas, right after laying out his own prime window, adds: "I have had some great bass fishing when it was dead low."
The study that timed them
From June to October 1998, Tupper and Able worked two salt marshes on the New Jersey shore of Delaware Bay: one restored from an old salt-hay farm, and a natural marsh beside it. They set gill nets at the creek mouths and up the creeks, and put transmitters in 23 bass to follow them through the tide.
| What they measured | Result |
|---|---|
| Catch rate, creek mouths vs. upper creeks | 1.17 vs. 0.13, about nine to one |
| When the bass were netted | about 80% on the late ebb or early flood, "around low tide" |
| Tagged fish (17–24 in) on the ebb | moved up the main creek; at the restored marsh 0.1–3.5 km (average 1.2 km, about ¾ mile) |
| Tagged fish on the flood | moved out into the bay, staying within 200–500 m (650–1,640 ft) of the mouth |
Two lines in that table run against habit. The first hours of the outgoing, when much of the advice puts you at a mouth, fall somewhere in the remaining fifth or so of the catch. And the tagged fish did not ride the ebb out of the marsh. They swam against it, up the creek, typically stopping every 200 to 300 meters for an hour or two, which the authors took for feeding stops. On the flood they went the other way, out past the mouth.
The 59 stomachs they checked, from fish 8 to 26 inches, held mostly blue crab, grass shrimp, sand shrimp, mummichogs and small fish. Why low water? The authors suggest prey were "presumably concentrated" at the mouths then. They did not measure the prey, so treat that as their best explanation, not a finding.
This is one marsh system in one year, well south of us, with fish of 8 to 26 inches, and two other marsh studies agree with it only in part. At Plum Island, Sarah Pautzke followed 11 tagged bass that spent the summer of 2006 in the Rowley River: they used its tidal creeks, under a meter (about 3 feet) deep at low tide, least at high slack. In a California marsh, Colombano and colleagues found the larger predators, striped bass among them, concentrated near the deeper channel mouth on the outgoing, especially when the tide ran higher than average. The mouth keeps coming up. The hour travels less well.
Where striped bass go at low tide
Not out of the marsh, in these studies. In Delaware Bay the nets found them at the creek mouths, and the tagged fish had spent the ebb working up the main creek. In the Rowley River the summer fish used the shallow creeks least at high slack, not at low. Bigelow and Schroeder described a related pattern in 1953 for shallow bays: bass chasing fry through the flooded marsh grass at high tide, then "dropping back into the deeper channels on the ebb." At low water, look to the channels and mouths a marsh drains through.
Two clocks at one Cape Cod gate
At the Herring River in Wellfleet, Christopher Rillahan and colleagues aimed an imaging sonar at the pool below a tide gate for 145 hours in May and June 2015, during the river herring run, and logged 7,847 sightings of striped bass 12 to 43 inches long. No bass passed the dike, and some were likely counted more than once as they milled, so a sighting there is an index of activity, not a head count.
By the tide chart, from the Wellfleet station 2 kilometers away, activity rose on the outgoing and peaked around the middle of it. At the gate it looked different. The dike delays the tide behind it, high water by 2.5 hours and low water by 2, so water was still flowing in through the gate at mid-ebb on the chart. The peak, 3.10 sightings a minute, came just before the gate's flow turned from in to out. At the hardest outflow it fell to 0.21 a minute, partly because bubbles blurred the sonar.
Read by the chart, those fish liked the outgoing. Read by the water at the gate, they peaked at the turn. A gate is not an open creek, but the lesson travels: tide is not current, and at a restricted mouth the two can run hours apart.
What to do with it
Ask what the water is doing at your spot, not what the chart says. Note when the current at your mouth actually turns. Upstream of the Wellfleet dike, high and low water ran 2 to 2.5 hours late.
At a marsh creek mouth, fish the bottom of the tide before you write it off. The last of the outgoing into the first of the incoming is where the Delaware Bay nets found most of their fish. Carrying that to a Massachusetts creek is inference, and a cheap one to test.
Expect a grassy flat to run the other way. The old description has bass up in the grass on the high and back in the channels as it drains.
Give every rip and point its own answer. As with reading a rip, a spot tends to fish one direction and one part of the tide, and only your notes will show which.
How StripedLines uses this
StripedLines is built for striped bass. It does not call one tide direction better everywhere. It shows each place's own current, not just the tide chart, because at some mouths the water runs hours off the chart — close to three behind at the Wellfleet gate.