March 1 officially reopens all waters west of the Corlies demarcation line for striped bass fishing in the Garden State of New Jersey. Finally fly-fishers can get into the back bays and rivers to pursue stripers, weakfish and bluefish. I, for one, approach the start of each season with great confidence. By the time I'm wetting a line for the first time, I've already convinced myself of three things. First, I'm sure I'm going to catch more fish than I did last year. Second, I just know I'm going to catch bigger fish than I did last year. And third, I'm certain Mother Nature will provide more days with light winds and calm seas than she did last year.
Keeping a positive attitude is definitely a good thing, but that alone will not guarantee a fruitful fishing season. Before the season begins, take inventory of all your tackle and start figuring out what line you will fish on what reel and with what rod. The idea is to end up with several outfits, each having a specific intended use. Preparedness is often the difference between catching and not catching.
The Catching Dilemma
As the fishing season approaches, I constantly find myself analyzing what I did right and, even more importantly, what I did wrong the previous year. I check and recheck my logbooks and measure how effective my time spent on the water actually was. In essence, my thinking boils down to this: Considering the fishing situations I was in last year, did I have a good cast-strike ratio?
True, there are days when the fish are nowhere to be found, and little or nothing can be done to change that. But what about when the angler standing next to you is hooking up left and right and you are not? Or how about when you've spent a good amount of time working an area, but when you move, another angler slips in and hooks up on the very first cast. Is it luck? Maybe, or maybe not. Situations such as these are what you should evaluate when it comes to preparing for a new season. Ask yourself what changes could be made to increase productivity and close the gap between your casts and strikes.
In my years as a charter captain, I learned some things the hard way, as I am sure many of us have. One of the most frustrating things was not catching fish when I knew I should be. I'm reminded of a situation I found myself in when I was just starting out in the sport. It was early spring, and the weakfish were being caught in good numbers. The tide was moving at a brisk clip, and the water was about six to eight feet deep. I was fishing an intermediate line from a sod bank and getting only occasional hookups. I was spending most of my time casting and stripping without any quantifiable results.
After a little while, a second angler came alongside me. He was fishing the same fly I had on but with a 400-grain sinking line. Almost immediately after his arrival, he was nailing a fish on nearly every cast. Obviously the weakies were hugging the bottom, and my intermediate line wasn't getting the fly into the strike zone.
The point is this: I learned the correct technique on the water, and I wasn't prepared to adapt. I had a whole bunch of flies that probably would have worked just fine, but I had only one rod and one line that couldn't get the job done.
