How to fish an inlet jetty for striped bass
Read the current edge, choose an upstream cast and control the lure through it. A practical guide to inlet jetties, close rock edges and changing flow.
4 min read
Tides & current
8 posts on tides & current.
You might not know this fish. Stripers do.
Follow a little marsh fish through the tide, habitat loss and a New Jersey restoration. Mummichogs connect overlooked feeding grounds to striped bass, but their story is local, not a proven coastwide collapse.
6 min read
Incoming or outgoing? In Delaware Bay's marsh creeks, the bass came at low water
No tide is best everywhere. A study that timed striped bass in Delaware Bay marsh creeks netted about 80 percent of them around low water, on the last of the outgoing and the first of the incoming, and its tagged fish swam up the creeks on the ebb instead of riding it out.
5 min read
Do striped bass face into the current? What science and striper sharpies actually tell us
A 1975 lab study measured juvenile striped bass turning to face moving water more often as velocity rose. Guides and surfcasters have been reading the same behavior in rips, at bridges, and around boulders for generations — here's the mechanism, and what it changes about where you cast.
7 min read
The river taught you how to fish the ocean
Wild brown trout spend 86% of their foraging time sitting still beside fast water, and the lab has measured what that buys them — including the finding that at high flow the cheapest place to hold was in front of the rock, not behind it. Here is what that teaches about holding water on the coast.
6 min read
The moon does something. The solunar table is not it.
Somebody tested popular solunar tables against real catch records and they failed to predict success. A separate study on a lake with no tides at all found the moon effect peaking at full AND new — which rules out both explanations usually offered. What survives is smaller, and more useful.
4 min read
The tide moves fish sideways, not up and down
Two analyses from one Bay of Fundy tagging project looked for a tidal effect on striped bass. One found no depth difference between ebb and flood across over 9,000 detections; the other found detection independent of water level (p = 0.93). The same fish do move vertically, just on a different clock.
3 min read
How to read a rip — where striped bass actually hold in moving water
A rip is the most readable piece of striper water on the coast. What makes one form, where the fish hold in it, how to find rips on a chart from Maine to Connecticut, and the one wind condition that should send you home.
4 min read