It won"t last much longer! The open water fishing on Great Bay, Little Bay and the Piscataqua River should be prime time right now to be able to catch a bunch of "eatable-sized" stripers, pollock and flounder, as well as a few other saltwater species that will soon be draining out of the warmer water and dropping down into the ocean.
Our favorite places to fish are not in Great Bay, but the name "Great Bay" has been used to describe most of the inland coastal tidal waters. "Great Bay" is not one of those tidal waters that provide any appreciable or dependable fishing spots!
Here are some places on Great Bay that often can provide some good angling action and the possibility to put together a bag of some you can eat with pleasure.
The river entrances into Great Bay and upstream in these rivers: Cocheco, Exeter, Lamprey and the Winnicut, especially on the last of the incoming tide, and the first two or three hours of the Piscataqua River.
Usually a stop at Suds-n-Soda Bait shop in Greenland will supply us with some good and lively sea worms or some live in-the-shell clams for bait, although when we can"t get the fresh and live bait we"ll often get in some decent catches using frozen cut bait (we like frozen clams the best as they hold on the hook well and the fish do feed on clams as part of their normal diet).
But we"ll also use cut pieces of our first caught pollock or mackerel for bait and you can catch these often by drift jigging with small diamond jigs or bait rigs with small hooks baited with cut fish or worms -even garden worms will often work for this when you can"t get the saltwater versions but they won"t produce usually as well as a small piece of cut mackerel or pollock.
You want to fish structure! We"re talking about irregularities in the river bottoms such as big boulders, rock piles, bridge pilings or any other structure that will provide hiding and resting places for the predator fish we just named.
Our best and most productive areas include the waters just off Fox Point in Newington/Dover. There"s an underwater point of ledge and boulders that extend off of Fox Point that form a great disturbance in the coastal flow and this place attracts baitfish and is thus a good place for the larger game fish, especially stripers, to gorge on them.
We"ve had days when we fished a complete incoming high and outgoing tide by sticking with that Fox Point Rip! There"s been some days when we could drop our anchor and fish over a productive rip without having to move, but most days the schools of stripers will move from one of these holding-spots to another and that"s when you have to move around to finding them.
This might not be too good for my own fishing, but a good way to spot where the fish are hitting is to acknowledge where the majority of boats are either anchored or drift fishing and join them. Do not interfere with their drifting patterns nor anchor too close to them so you don"t impact their fishing!
Know that these fish will move around as the tide dictates. After a while of fishing this area, you will be able to spot some of the places that a small group of boats will move to. Join them but, as we said before, do not anchor so close as to impact their fishing and do not drop you anchor where it impedes the flow of boats over productive structure. (We learned this the hard way when we were a teenager and got into drifting patterns that screwed up what some of the "old-timers" were doing!)
Hey, the fish are there now and will be for a few more weeks. Get out and get you some and give thanks to your maker that we were blessed with having these incredible tidal waters to fish. Drop us an email at doduckinn@aol.com and get out there and maybe we"ll see you land a monster striper! See you out there.
Dick Pinney"s column appears weekly in the New Hampshire Sunday News. Email him at DoDuckInn@aol.com.
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