After a summer of record high temperatures, intense humidity and plenty of harsh weather, I couldn’t be more grateful for September. I’m not much of a summer person to begin with. That’s partly because I just don’t get the same fishing opportunities that come with spring, fall and even winter. I think many anglers who target stripers would agree that autumn is an absolutely explosive time!

Starting around mid-August, the fish start preparing for the migration south that will take place over the next few months until around November (at least here in New England). Instinctively they start to feed more aggressively. Atlantic silversides move in to my fishing spots by the millions. I start seeing more bird activity and lots of blitzing fish as a result. In fact, as I’m writing this I am on a beach with my 9-wt., periodically looking up to check for busting bass.

Despite the aggressive feeding and the seemingly easier fishing conditions, the bass can get annoyingly selective about what they’ll eat during all of this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown flies to schools of hundreds of fish, splashing and spraying baitfish, cast after cast, expecting the line to go tight any second… and then nothing! Even though I still have some days like that, there are strategies I implement now to increase chances of success. I wanted to share some of my learnings here in hopes that the angler who reads it will be able to glean from my failures and successes.

#1 Learn To Eliminate False Casting 

This is one of the most important skills I’ve learned as a fly fisherman (not just in saltwater). There are many reasons to cast the fly with only one back cast, i.e, stealth, avoiding injury, tangling. The most important one for me is to avoid your fly wrapping around itself. I absolutely hate when I retrieve a streamer, waiting for a grab, only to find the feathers or bucktail or whatever material wrapped around the shank. Fish will almost certainly ignore your offering if this happens and false casting is usually the cause. This is especially frustrating when casting to busting fish, who might not be there by the time you get your fly back in the water. The more time your fly spends in the air fighting the wind while whipping back and forth, the more likely it is to wrap.

I remember teaching a fly tying class this past winter where we were tying Blane Chocklett’s Game Changer pattern. After building the long tail section, someone commented on how much they expected the fly to foul when they went to fish it. I responded by saying “if you know how to cast a streamer properly, especially on a sinking line, it won’t be a problem”. A few people in the class kind of scoffed and laughed at this. I stand by my statement. Unless you’re trying to dry out an adams, there is little reason ever to false cast.

I learned how to do this by fishing sink tips for a long time, and eventually I took what I learned and applied it to intermediate and eventually floating lines. Fly line (especially saltwater fly line) is heavy enough that if you get enough out in front of you with a roll cast pick up, you’ll have enough weight to propel the line forward with a double haul and one back cast. Keep in mind that there’s no substitute for good casting technique. This requires practice. I’ve fished with and met lots of people who don’t work on their casting principles, and wonder why they struggle to catch fish. It’s important to practice.

Sink tips and WF lines really help when learning to get the fly out in one shot. I personally try to have about 25 ft of line in front of me (the majority of the WF taper) when I begin the back stroke. Roll casting helps get the line to lay straight in front of you, and also keeps everything tight and at the surface so you can avoid too much water load when you start going back. If you can get most of the WF head in front of you, this will provide the resistance and weight needed to generate the energy that will propel everything to the target. False casting is only done to increase line speed, which produces energy. If you can get the line speed by generating the same amount of energy from the double haul and the water load, as well as the weight of the line, you have all you need to achieve distance. In fact you’ll probably achieve more distance because you’re eliminating the variables caused from having your fly in the air for too long.

Again, this is something that requires timing and practice. It’s worth it. If you can, practice this technique on the water as much as possible. Grass is good for working on casting if that’s what is available to you, but whenever you can practice in water, you’ll be more equipped to cast properly in a fishing situation.

#2 Poppers, Sliders and Crease Flies

Few things are more enjoyable than watching a big fish decimate a top water fly. It’s a pinnacle moment when you finally convince a striper to eat one. Not all surface patterns are the same though, and there are different situations in which you might want one or the other.

The first situation I want to touch on is during a blitz, or at least when casting to busting fish. Depending on the depth of the water, I’ll typically go with a popper style fly in deeper or in choppy water. Something that has a concave face that causes a bit of disturbance with each strip. If the fish are really revved up, they’ll typically hit after one or two pops. Even if they’re more selective, something that will make a big “gulp” sound when you strip will at least cause them to inspect it, and a lot of times they’ll hit it if they’re worried about another fish getting it first.

Traditional popper style flies are also great for ringing the dinner bell when nothing seems to be happening. Fish might be present, but not showing themselves on top. In my experience, they will still hit top water even if they’re feeding subsurface (this time of year). The trick is to vary your retrieve speed, and how hard you make the fly pop. If the water is calm, try a slow retrieve with a few big pops here and there. If that’s not productive, then do the opposite and pop the fly fast with an erratic retrieve. If conditions are windy and choppy, make as much commotion as you can.

During the fall run, I’ll make it a point on higher tides to fish rocky points where waves crash and create whitewash. You’d be surprised how many stripers are attacking bait in a foot or less of water after a wave breaks. Sometimes you see them busting in the foam. Other times they might not show themselves but they are definitely there. Just yesterday I caught a beautiful 28 inch fish casting into a wave break. The fish didn’t show any sign it was there until hitting my crease fly! These are the situations where a fly rod excels! Small offerings in shallow waters.

I like to use crease flies and slider patterns when fishing a wave break. Having something that is able to dive on a strip and come back up in between helps your fly get noticed in the few seconds you have before the whitewash dissipates. The fish are already there so there’s no need to make a lot of commotion with a big popper. I really love the way crease flies imitate wounded or disoriented bait. They’ll still give a pop, but then they’ll do this jackknife motion just under the surface. Bass love them!

#3 Match the Hatch

The first time I ever had a chance to cast to busting fish on the top was about 4 years ago. It was late October. Only small fish remained in the area and they weren’t selective at all. I could’ve put on anything that had bucktail on a hook and they wouldn’t have cared. That tricked me for the next year into thinking that blitzing fish will hit anything you throw, big or small, any color. As soon as the fall run began the next year, I got so excited to see all the fish going crazy in mid august. I realized however how wrong I was about busting fish not being picky. In fact, I had never encountered more selective fish in my life. I spent weeks out there most days getting skunked that season.

Eventually I figured out that the fish were locked in on silversides. Anything subsurface I put on that didn’t have that bright silver stripe on it didn’t get eaten. I started experimenting with different materials at the vise such as Fleye foils, stickers and even straight up aluminum foil. Epoxy and resin helped me build the bodies and I would vary between using bucktail or supreme hair for the tail. These were basically surf candies with slight variations here and there. They still worked but I would still have days when they wouldn’t touch them.

The break through came when I started fishing only floating lines with longer leaders, bringing a variety of skinny poppers and crease flies designed match the color and profile of a silverside, along with bringing surf candies and extremely sparse clousers. On days when they wouldn’t hit the subsurface offerings, they would usually hit the top water. When top water wasn’t producing, they would almost always take a skinny clouser cast into the feeding circle. Having the flies needed to not only match the bait but also to offer the right presentation on top and below the surface allowed me get my fly in the mouth of more stripers.

As the season progresses, the stripers food choices become more diverse again and it’s important to keep patterns in your box that resemble other bait species. As September rolls on I make it a point to keep a lot of EP flies in my box because they’re great for mimicking a peanut bunker. Depending on where you live, the bait you need to imitate will vary.

Here’s a few patterns I recommend for September and October striper fishing:

• • Clouser (olive/white)
  • Crease Flies (white)
  • Poppers (white)
  • Surf Candies (olive)
  • EP Peanut Butter (olive/white) (black)
  • Tabory Snake Fly (white)

Hopefully the person reading this blog will benefit from some of my insights. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to stripers in the fall, but these were all game changing revelations for me. There are more topics I could go on about but this post is already way too long! 😂