With changing weather patterns, finding ocean linesiders may take some work, but small-boat anglers who put in the time can have success.
Gary Dubiel of Spec Fever Guide Service has been featured by PBS, ESPN and Discovery Europe television channels.
That means when it comes to fishing for striped bass at the N.C. coast, he knows his business.
Dubiel runs the 23-foot center console Spec Fever year round throughout the Pamlico Sound area, including New Bern and Oriental, plus Weldon in the spring and Morehead City.
He fishes inshore, inside and upriver for red and black drum, gray and spotted seatrout, king and Spanish mackerel, inland stripers and tarpon.
But he reserves January for nearshore oceanic migratory striped bass. If the big Atlantic stripers aren’t just outside Oregon Inlet, they’re still in range, and Dubiel knows how to find them.
Ocean stripers typically swim in North Carolina waters when the temperature cools to 55 or 60 degrees during December or January, but that’s only part of their profile, Dubiel said.
Temperatures alone won’t tell anglers where to look — or even when.
“The first question to resolve is how far south they have already migrated,” Dubiel said. “If they haven’t come into and traversed most of Virginia, don’t bother looking for them here, no matter the temperature.”
Striped bass can’t skip from cold water to cold water across a warm current. They cover a large area and move like a shifting mass rather than in a single clump, bulldozing their way through uncomfortable waters.
But when they get here eventually, or close enough, Dubiel can reach them with a fast boat out of Oregon Inlet.
“Last year I had to run north of the Army Corps of Engineers pier at Duck, some days all the way to the Virginia line,” he said. “On the bright side, they were spread out from the beach to about 50-feet deep, which is usually right about at the 3-mile limit.”
Anglers can’t fish for stripers in the federal zone outside 3 miles, but the fish typically trade across both sides of the line and frequently come near the Outer Banks’ shore.
Anglers may not be able to reach them by casting from the beach, but guys with small boats are almost always able to find and catch linesiders. The good news is anglers also don’t need a big boat to fish within sight of the beach.
“The second important information is the location of bait,” he said.
Dubiel looks for large concentrations of gannets, which are sea birds. He said other sea birds are not nearly so important to anglers when it comes to finding “rockfish.”
Masses of gannets are more important than flocks of terns “because gannets prefer the same size baitfish as stripers, 4 or 5 inches and larger,” Dubiel said.
The baitfish that most often bring stripers are concentrations of half-sized menhaden (bunkers, Brevoortia) or shad (Alosa), large spearing (glass minnows), silversides (Menidia), bay anchovies (Anchoa), and winter sand launces (sand eels, Ammodytes).
Sand eels are a big deal at Cape Cod, but silversides are the major baitfish for N.C. stripers.
“Spearing (minnows) are the most important bait attracting stripers,” Dubiel said. “They can get thick enough to turn your (depth-finder) chart black.
“We often get a 40-foot-thick layer of packed spearing in 50 feet of water with the school, extending a half mile up the beach.”
But what if anglers don’t see gannets flying above schools of stripers or can’t find spearing schools visually with a fish-finder?
“In mid-winter you can also watch for whales,” Dubiel said.
Humpback and right whales are common off the beaches during the late winter, probably eating spearing, Dubiel said. Find the feeding whales and anglers often will see a big slick in the water behind them.
“That’s where you’ll run into stripers,” he said.
What if none of these indicators are present?
“Look for concentrations of boats, of course,” he said.
Dubiel enjoys jumping on massive schools of 25- to 35-pound striped bass and casting to them if he can.
“It doesn’t matter what you throw, as they hit everything they see,” he said.
He uses mostly bucktail jigs, top-water plugs and soft plastics when he finds a concentration of fish.
If there aren’t a lot of fish at the surface or he can’t mark a big school (or they’re deep and not feeding), he trolls artificial lures.
Dubiel runs four lines from Spec Fever (anglers shouldn’t try to get hooked up with too many fish simultaneously). He runs two flat lines with planers off the stern with release clips, pulling large plastics (8- to 9-inch-long lures such as a Storm or a large bucktail with a 6- to 8-inch-long plastic tail). That takes care of deep fish.
“The outside rods have large plugs such as Stretch 30s,” he said. Those hard baits will reach fish at mid depths.
Stretch lures of different sizes are made to run at different depths, but Dubiel said he’s always in water 50 feet or less — often 20- to 40-feet deep, which is too deep to reach by casting but an easy run for a small boat.
Is January a good time?
It’s probably the best month, Dubiel said.
The peak of fishing for big migratory ocean stripers is the end of December to early February. And anglers shouldn’t pay too much attention to the web-based reports of water temperatures at Oregon inlet or Cape Point, he said. Even when the water is warmer at most places, the coastal beach current from Corolla to Duck is generally cold, so stripers arrive there every year.
And if the masses of bait move south into warmer water, throw away the book “because the stripers will follow the bait anywhere,” Dubiel said.
What happens to them when they leave in mid-February?
Dubiel said they probably move offshore, also following bait and comfortable water temperatures. Mid-winter coastal waters off North Carolina tend to be freezing and devoid of baitfish, so wherever the baitfish go the stripers are likely to follow.
These stripers also don’t turn around and head north until late each spring.
Will the fishing get better and last forever and what does the future hold?
Most anglers believe they’re in hog heaven when the stripers arrive (or get close enough to reach with a small boat), but Dubiel has a more cautious perspective and isn’t sanguine for the future.
“We seem to be taking fewer and larger fish the past several years, and that’s not a good sign,” he said. “I think we’re selectively taking the big roe females that provide the next generation of stripers.”
It’s a common theme throughout the history of recreational fisheries. Fishermen have a limit and take that limit from the biggest fish, which are the females in the case of striped bass. The population as a whole declines, and the average size rapidly declines as the big fish are plucked and little ones returned to the water.
But aren’t there tons of fish out there, enough for everybody, especially with a limit of just two fish per person per day?
Dubiel pointed to the massive numbers of boats fishing for nearshore oceanic stripers. A big charter boat (and there are loads of them based out of Virginia and North Carolina) carries six people, plus captain and crew members also are allowed their two stripers per trip. And these boats can make two half-day trips every day, if enough people want to fish.
That adds up to a lot of the biggest females taken out of the breeding population.
But is Dubiel’s perceived decline in striped bass numbers real or imagined?
He said striped bass schools once extended from Virginia southward to Cape Lookout, but anglers seldom see fish at Cape Lookout these days.
Dr. Wilson Laney of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who conducts annual tagging studies of oceanic striped bass, reported last year scientists recovered a single fish tagged from the Cape Fear population. He said he didn’t know if that indicated a decline or scientists weren’t sampling that stock and had picked up a straggler.
Laney said he believes most of the winter stripers that visit the N.C. coast hail from the Hudson River (New York) to the Chesapeake Bay rivers, with some contribution from Pamlico Sound rivers.
That information would seem to indicate striped bass are recovering nicely to the north of us, but may not be doing as well south of Cape Hatteras. And that means the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the states, and National Marine Fisheries Service still have work to do.
So far so good, but there is still a way to go before we have a stable striper population with a good spread of spawning stock over many year classes.
Dubiel and other observers hope today’s anglers aren’t eating our striper seed corn.
