[PECo]

I forgot to rinse the salt off of my tackle on Wednesday, so I figured that I might as well hit the mouth of the Connecticut, again, today. I planned another short trip and was on the water from 9:45 am to 12:30 pm. The weather was just like Wednesday, except that it was much less windy. The water was murky and the water temperature hung between 68 and 70 degrees. The high tide at Saybrook Jetty was at 11:25 am.

I headed down to the edge of the flats across from the inlet that's halfway down the west bank from the railroad bridge to North Cove and dropped the Ultrex into the water. I motored across the flats to the inlet, but didn't see anything. Strangely, although the trailer parking area at the launch had about five times as many trailers in it as there were on Wednesday, I didn't see any other boats fishing nearby. I guess I should have taken that as a sign I should head out into the Sound, but I'm reluctant to do that in my little bass boat.

Instead of working my way down the bank, I pulled the Ultrex and started the big motor to run quickly down to North Cove. After I dropped the Ultrex back into the water, I saw big schools of bait everywhere. And it was all different kinds of bait; big bait and small bait. At 10:25 am, as I threw a Daiwa SP minnow over the edge of the channel leading to North Cove, I thought that I snagged up on some weeds, but I didn't:



The bunker actually bit the hook and got hooked inside the mouth. Weird.

I worked my way down the channel and away from North Cove, when I saw something blitzing on some bunker ahead of me. At 10:35 am, I got a strong hit from a striped bass. . . and it was a keeper! As it swam past the bow of my boat, I saw that there were a couple more trying to steal the lure from the one I had hooked. When I finally got it boatside, I saw that it had inhaled the SP Minnow and the rear trebles were down in its gills. It was well over 30 inches long, but was bleeding all over the place by the time I got the hooks out of it, so I released it without taking a photo. However, I shot a short video of the school of bunker surrounding the boat and the crime scene the keeper left behind on my carpeted deck:

https://youtu.be/8Fjj2YdTpv8





After I boated the keeper, I never saw anything else breaking on any of the many schools of bait. I spent the next hour and 20 minutes throwing the SP Minnow over, around and through various schools of bait, but there wasn't anything feeding on it. It wasn't until almost noon, when I had wandered back near the inlet on the west bank, that I hooked into a little schoolie:



I took that as a sign, gave up and headed back to the ramp. After I pulled my boat out of the water, I spoke with another fisherman who had pulled his boat out before me. He said that there were some keeper stripers and large bluefish near the rocks beyond Saybrook Point. I guess that I should have ventured out there, after all.

The pain in the butt about fishing at the mouth of the river is that I have to rinse the salt out of everything when I'm done; the trailer, the boat, the motor and my tackle. The good news is that I'm done with all of that. I went all Dexter on my carpeting; a garden hose, a wet/dry vacuum, some carpet cleaner and some degreaser worked wonders. You can't even tell that a keeper striper almost bled to death on my front deck.
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Don't forget to wear sunscreen and don't litter!