On board today, I had new clients Wes Paul and Darrel Tudella, for light tackle striped bass.

At first light. SW wind and a high tide dropping. After this past weekends Nor-easter, I was thinking the bay would be lit up with birds, bait and bass. I was wrong. Not a single bird working anywhere in Duxbury, Kingston or Plymouth, and no bait anywhere. And no bass for the first couple of hours of our charter.

After searching the entire three bays for topwater action, I made the switch to all structure fishing. We rigged out rubber crank baits for sub-surface, Baymen Jigs for bottom fishing deeper waters, and Spooks and Cotton Cordells for topwater shallows. Rigged up and ready, we started in on the goal of finding 15 fish on structure.

As the tide bottomed out, we found our first fish of the morning on a small pod of bait, hugging the bottom in 12 fow. The rubber crankbaits did the trick and we boated several fat schoolies to 27″ inches. Beautiful fish on light tackle. In one of our drifts, I marked a BIG bass on sonar but the smaller fish got to the tackle first, every drift.

Next spot we switched up to topwater poppers. We worked a lovely piece of structure and pulled only one fish out of the area. It looked perfect to hold a dozen fish but they just were not in the bay today in any numbers.

From there, we ran to a deep water cut along a channel and put down the Baymen Jigs on the bottom. I have fished this spot for years on this tide and always find fish. Today, there were no fish in this spot. We really had out work cut out for us!

Next, we fished rubber crankbaits over some lovely structure in shallow waters. Nothing on the structure but as we drifted past it and kept fishing, we found bass on the bottom that were coming down another channel as they exited the bay. Some fat chunkers were boated. We worked the area hard and landed one more fish before moving on.

The last couple of stops of the morning yielded several more fish all on Spooks and Pencil Poppers, on the rising tide. I had many other spots I wanted to get to today, but our time ran out and we had to call it a great morning. Total catch and release today was 26 fish to 27″ inches. All very fat, beautiful striped bass. A great light tackle morning on the bay – once we figured it all out!

Back at it. Happy June and best of luck to all anglers fishing this month.

Capt. David Bitters, BAYMEN, www.baymenlife.com