Big Fake Eels on the Bottom

Catch trophy stripers holding tight to structure with giant soft-plastic baits.

Some 20 feet separated Cory Crochetiere and me aboard MARC VI while jigging for striped bass off Rhode Island this past July. Using identical tacklePenn rods and Battle III 5000 reels, 20-pound Sufix 832 braid, 40-pound fluoro leader, GT plastic eels and Atlas jig heads-Crochetiere was pitching a shutout.

After Cory released his sixth big striper, I studied what he was doing differently. This intel provided a boost toward getting strikes and finally into the groove. We went on to release a dozen bass upward of 40 pounds in four hours, and four more releases within a few hours during the following afternoon's tide. Success came down to subtleties.

Drift and Drop

Artificial eels are especially cherished throughout the mid-Atlantic and Northeast for trophy striped bass. As basic as they appear pinned on a jig head, they demand a lot of attention to make them look alive. A master of manipulating the long plastic, Crochetiere practices this art nearly exclusively during New England's trophy bass migration. Bassing out of Westerly, Rhode Island, we were jigging along the Southwest Ledge, concentrating on its 35-to 55-foot-deep crown. It was here where striped bass were marked blanketing the bottom. Each pass began a few hundred feet up-current of the fish and culminated a hundred or so feet down-current of the crown, usually with a single- or doubleheader score.

A Quick Study

My first lesson learned: Give these bass what they're keyed into eating. Crochetiere fished Gravity Tackle's Calamari. I began with flutter-style irons. When he pulled out to a five-fish lead, I had to switch over.