[Shawsee]

RKC,

I am not familiar with the area you will be fishing because I do mainly all of my striper fishing out at Block Island. However stripers are stripers no matter where they congregate I suppose. We do well this time of year with eels drifting them across rocky bottoms and boulder fields. Eels work best at night and throughout the early morning hours. Usually after the sun is up for a bit we will switch over to trolling with a tube & worm. Or we troll with wire & umbrella rigs with flashers and teasers on the arms and with one trailing soft plastic bait rigged with a 7/0 hook. Also we will drift a bucktail jig and bounce it along a rocky bottom if the tide and drift is working for us.

The best way to get some stripers druing the day is to live line porgies if you can catch some or net some with a cast net. A Sabiki rig works great also for catching porgies for bait. If I had a livewell on my V-20 I would surely be catching some porgies and live line them along a hump or some rocky bottoms. Another great productive way to catch stripers is to "snap wire" with a parachute jig. It's a lot of work to do because you must keep working the rod back and forth as you are trolling, but the rewards are pretty good when you do hook up.

We went out Wed night out to Block. Perfect night with a full moon and the water was calm with very little movements. Perfect night fishing stripers with eels so we thought. Dogfish have invaded the Island and all we could catch were those because they were everywhere. I shined my spotlight in the water and there were hundreds of dogfish all around us. We would move and they were there in numbers as well. So what should have been a great night turned into a big let down for us.

I hope you do good RKC, good luck!