Fishing North Carolina and Virginia for Giant Striped Bass
Giant Winter Striped Bass in the Chesapeake with Steve Griffin
Middle Chesapeake Bay Fishing December-April
Patterns of Striped Bass
Tech gear and Boats
Striped Bass in the Middle Chesapeake Bay
Jud: Steve thanks for jumping on the podcast with Michael and I. We are excited to do a little trip recap from our time up on MAryland as well as let people hear about your fishery.
Steve: Thanks man. It’s going good. It’s a pleasure to be talking to you guys and talk about our fun trip we had last week.
Jud: It feels like that was a month ago. Maybe I’m too busy. For us, it was like an old school trip. Drive six hours one way to fish. We spend more time in the car than on the boat but it’s all for fishing.
Mike: We’ve made mountain trips to trout fish, small mouth fish, bass fish in Raleigh. All over the place.
Jud: We’ve done a lot.
Steve: It adds to the experience.
Jud: It does man, it makes it a full on adventure. Especially when Michael drives the whole thing.
Steve: That’s the type of stuff you never forget.
Jud: That’s the truth. So tell people a little bit about who you are. You’ve been on here before talking about Cobia and big red fish and stuff like that. Give us your backstory a little bit and then we’ll go from there.
Steve: My name is Captain Steve Griffin. I’ve run Griffin’s guy service in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. I run a 28 foot Seahunter Floridian which is just a fun boat to fish live tackle off us. IT’s the perfect platform and we do anything from giant reds in the summer to speckled trout and shallow-water rockfish like striped bass and stripers. And we also get a nice run of some huge stripers in the winter. That’s what we’re doing right now.
Jud: I’ve caught a lot of stripers in my life but I’ve never caught a monster until I came up there with you. I have been so intrigued that past two or three years with just the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries and fisheries; it is just the Mecca, more so than Florida. It’s different species in Florida but for big fish, big cobia, tarpon, big reds, massive stripers, huge trout.. We probably shouldn’t talk about it as much as we do, but it is such an incredible fishery and it’s cool to see how it’s grown. Walk me through the big striper season; they are migratory right? They aren’t there all the time. What does the season look like for y’all?
Steve: Yeah that’s right, they go up North into Montauk and all that in the warmer months but we start seeing some really nice fish in December usually right around Christmas time to go after the big fish . They’re showing up in December and then they’ll hang out in the bay until April or May where they do their spawning in all our tributaries, then they make their way back out of the bay and ahead up North. It’s great that we get to target them and catch them while they’re in the bay. It’s a really special time; it’s all catch and release so it’s cold water, not hurting the fish and it’s a great time.
Jud: It’s an incredible time.
Steve: We have our stripers year around but those are the resident fish which are usually 32 inch fish is a really good resident fish so these migratory fish are usually 32 and up. When they show up, it’s some fun fishing.
Jud: Do you have smaller fish migrating as well? Or are they only migrating when they hit that 32 and up.
Steve: I’m not the scientist on this, but I am pretty sure when they reach about 26 inches they are mature and they might start migrating, but a lot of them will hang out in the bay. A lot of them will hang out until they are about 30 inches then they start heading up North.
Jud: How many months do you have those big fish in your system?
Steve: They are here for December, January, February, March, April and then they are pretty much gone by mid May.
Jud: That’s awesome! That’s a long time.
Steve: Yeah, sometimes they can be hard to target but typically we’ve got them patterned pretty good. April the Maryland, we have a no target rules, so we really aren’t even supposed to catch and release because that’s when they’re doing their business and they want to leave them alone. That’s a good thing, but we’ve got several months to play with these big girls when they’re here.
Mike: Do you all see these fish going up river and disappearing for a few days before you get a fresh push or something like that? And then they kind of return or show up as they travel and leave from the Bay area and go up into the tributaries or do they stay a good group of fish there all the time?
Steve: They definitely come in waves and then in certain parts of the bay, they’ll do their spawning earlier and then later. A lot of that has to do with water temperature. Shallower areas further South in the Bay, those fish might Spawn and then head out sooner, than the ones going into the Potomac River which is a deeper river so it takes longer for that water to warm up. They are coming in waves and they are going out in waves so their here all the time and they’re all doing something different, but in May they disappear.
Mike: We don’t have quite the biomass of fish that y’all have but come March, they go ahead and start heading up river and then in April they are spawning and rolling out into the middle of the river by mid April or early May.
Steve: When water temperatures hit 50-55 degrees it triggers their spawn and once they spawn, they are gone and they are on a mission to get up north.
Jud: yeah the big stripers that come into our river and spawn, there is a handful that do, scientists say that they’ll blast up, do their thing and come back down very quickly. They will stage an area in winter for a longer period of time, but that actual push up to spawn and then drop back down, they’ve got sonic tags so they can actually track the fish when they swim past a certain place it will ding it. They are getting these big fish dinging that thing, swimming up, spawning and three days later they will ding it again. This is when they are way up in the tributaries in the shallow, rocky stuff. It’s pretty crazy that they’re doing it.
Mike: I don’t know how far up they go, but here they are making it 70-80 miles up the coast so it’s way up there.
Steve: It’s amazing how far they travel. These fish are just incredible. They go hundreds of miles up into the bay.
Jud: It is impressive. It’s crazy. When you think about salmon and the runs they make; they die for it.
Mike: how do they find their way back to that one particular area?
Jud: From the coast of freaking California or something. It’s like the sea turtle. It is harder to be the sea turtle and come to the same spot on the beach or to be the salmon and make it all the way to Idaho.
Steve: They’ve got to find the right creek and the right River. That’s what’s amazing about the Chesapeake. For them to get to me in the middle bay, they pass a ton of huge rivers and bodies of water that they could easily go hang out in and spawn in, and to be honest, a lot of them down south would be better, but they make it all the way up to DC. It’s crazy.
Mike: Do you think you get bigger fish in your direction because you’ve got the Potomac and some of those deeper rivers? Or cleaner water? Why do you think down south would be better?
Steve: There’s a lot less buildings and infrastructure down south; there’s a lot less in that perspective. These fish have been coming all the way up here forever and they are just going to continue to do it. I don’t know why the fish that come up and bypass those areas do, but they’re here.
Mike: I’m assuming it’s like Salmon. They go back to the same spot they were born. They know those chemical markers or whatever it may be. That might be the reason, but I didn’t know if you thought water quality was better or something.
Jud: I wonder how much of it is just imprinting mental patterns. Like our redfish in the winter ending up in the same little pocket in the marsh in the winter. There are never fish in the summer and then all the sudden in the winter there are 300-500 fish sitting there. Not every winter, but there are spots that continually work and hold fish and I feel like there’s a lot of the sea turtle thing. This mental pattern that’s imprinted on them. A lot of animals are like that but maybe we are thinking too much about it. Who really cares as long as they are there?
Steve: I agree 100% I think they do go back to where they were spawned and born and how they know where to go is crazy.
Average Day of Winter Time Striper Fishing
Jud: So take me through what a day of striper fishing looks like for you this time of year? Wintertime striper fishing, what is an average day?
Steve: As we work through the winter, we get lots of changes in patterns and it changes the way I have to target them. Early in December and January, the name of the game is burning gas, running miles and looking for a big gamut show. You’e looking for waves of migratory fish coming in. We’ll find some huge birds working big piles of bait and really nice fish under them. It’s kind of like shooting for a homerun in December and early January and now in mid to late January they are slowing down and we are really having to grind for them and get them fired up. I am going places that I know where they typically hold and where currents are ripping over ledges and we’re going to go out and grind on them. We’re going to be jigging, metals, flutter butter. We recently started using flutter spoons and those huge flutter spoons, I don’t know what it is but they get these fish fired up.
Jud: It must look like a menhaden that got smacked and missed and just falling to the bottom. They are huge spoons for people who have never fished one.
Steve: Yeah they are like a gatorade bottle size and these fish just crush them. As we get real deep into winter, there are certain areas where we have to go find them. It gets harder to go get them because the fish are a lot more dead. They are just laying on the bottom really not doing a whole lot. So we are going to places that you would go anywhere. Warm water discharges our plans. Places where they are going to be holding up. Shallow water place that will warm up quickly in the day and that kind of just gets those fish in there where they are comfortable and they can move around.
Jud: One of the surprising things about fishing with you was how light of a rod you were fishing heavy jigs with. An ounce and a half, two ounces, on a medium. What’s the reasoning? What’s the benefit?
Steve: when I go with a two ounce head, I bump up to medium/heavy just so I have that sensitivity. Once you have to much weight on a rod, then you just have a limp rod and you don’t have much sensitivity, but my reasoning is that’s really all you need to fight these fish. We’re doing it on light tackle, we’re drifting or we’re over an area and you don’t need much more than a medium rod with a 2500 or 3000 series spinning reel and 10 pound braid to get this fish. We’re in open water, we aren’t trying to rip them out or anything like that sio we just let them run and do their thing and then bring them up to the boat. I think you got a really big fish and whipped it quickly with a light tackle. That;s why I do it. It’s fun and it really doesn’t hurt the fish. We can fight these fish and get them in the boat faster than guys trolling with big trolling gear because they are just dragging the fish behind the boat.
Jud: I would agree. It seems like that could potentially be much more harmful to these fish.
Steve: And the other thing is, I’m using light gear because if you were running 30-40 pound braid, that braid when you’re dropping it down 60 feet out on channels, you’re going to get so much road and so much bow on that line you’re gonna have no sensitivity. If you have a 10 pound braid and you drop it down, you’re going to have a lot more sensitivity on that and when you set the hook, you’ve got a lot less line to take out to really be able to get that hook set.
Jud: That makes sense for sure. You could feel on those massive spoons that when it gets down there, it doesn’t feel that heavy. It feels lighter and you can feel the bites really really well. It was a lot of fun. I was surprised.You really don’t have a lot of heavy structure at least where we fished. You weren’t trying to wench fish out of a heavy structure or anything. You were just over sand or mud bottom, whatever it was.
Steve: Yeah, that was a pretty muddy area. We can let the fish run and they can go pretty much anywhere and then these big stripers, they do a run or two and then they are pretty much turned and they are coming back to the boat. They’ve got nice big head shape but they aren’t like a redfish that will fight twice as hard.
Jud: do you think that has to do with the fish themselves or are they just more lethargic because of the water temp?
Steve: I think it’s the fish, because even let’s say, compare apples to apples, if I catch a 25 inch redfish in the summer and then catch a 25 inch striper, the redfish would definitely pull the striper around. If you hook them together. It’s just the way they run. A redfish is going to do several long runs and a big striper will just do one big run. I think it’s the fish because they all seem to do that.
Mike: Looking at the body shape of a striper vs. a red fish, redfish are just thick and have shoulders right behind their head. Not that stripers aren’t but they are much more streamlined and more designed for long distance travel.
Jud: Those fat bull redfish just float around all day. Those things are animals.
Steve: Then they’re angry.
Jud: They’ve saved up all those calories. Not to downplay the fight. The fight on that 40 plus striper I caught was awesome. How deep were we? 30 feet of water?
Steve: Don’t downplay it at all. It is so fun and it is not easy. We lost one that was probably 50 inches on the boat yesterday. Right at the boat and the guy just didn’t keep it tight enough and spit the hook.
Jud: That is so painful for a fish like that. What’s so sad about fishing is that I came up there last week and caught a 41 inch striper. My biggest one before that was 33-34 inches and now I am immediately discontent and want to come up there and get a 50 inch fish with you. Not that it wasn’t incredible, but I thought 40 was the end all but you just said 50 and I;m like “okay, well now I need to come back up there and catch a 50.” They are one of my favorite fish. They are so pretty, people think they are just black and white but there are purple and green.
Steve: Especially those ones coming out of the ocean, they’ve got all the colors and it’s so special because you know they just traveled all the way down the east coast and here they are in the Chesapeake Bay. It's Mind-blowing that they make it into the Bay from all the way up there and they do it every year like clockwork.
Unique Qualities of Striped Bass
Jud: Here’s a question: Do you think if you asked a striper is your home th Chesapeke Bay or is your home Maine? Where is their homebase?
Steve: I would think Chesapeake Bay is home. They probably spend more time here than anywhere. Once they leave here they spend a couple months traveling up north, and they aren’t there long before they turn back around to spawn in the Chesapeake Bay again.
Jud: It’s so similar to Tarpon. The tarpon goes from Florida to where y’all are. What’s the top of the reach for the striper y’all have?
Steve: Man, they go way up. I was talking to a guy fishing up in Canada and they get them up there. He uses some of the same baits that you caught your fish on; I was talking to the owner of the company who makes those baits “Local Baits” and this guy up in CAnada orders them to fish for these same fish when they come up to Canada. It’s awesome the journey they make.
Jud: They’re really the most diverse fish or most spread out on the east coast if you think about it. There are stripers all the way down in southern Florida and there are rivers in Florida that have striper and all the way to Canada. I don’t know of another in-shore fish that is in more States. Do y’all?
Steve: They are incredible species.
Jud: Spanning so much temperature difference too.
Mike: Redfish could challenge that as far as mileage goes since they go all the way around to Texas.
Jud: But it’s too salty for them down there so you start to get into the sanuk. It’s crazy. I don’t know, I never thought about it, but maybe there is a scientist out there that just studies that.
Steve: I’d love to catch on in every state. To follow that awesome migration up. There are guys that do, there’s actually a movie called “Running the Coast.” It’s a great movie and they follow the stripers from the Chespeke Bay all the way up into Massachusetts and maybe into Maine. Everyone targets them differently.
Jud: That’s a unique thing about each fish, when you talk to different anglers and guides in different states who are fishing the same fish but in different ways. There’s a guy I talk to down in Florida who fishes jetties and like 20 feet of water with deep diving crank baits and bounces them off the rocks for bull red fish. A bass bait. I’ve never thought about that. Granted, ripping a deep diving crank bait over and over again for a few bites is a lot of work but a unique way to catch them. I guess you could turn around and troll them, but then you’re trolling.
Steve: That is really cool. That’s one thing we have in the Chesapeake every 1-2 weeks: the pattern changes so we have to target differently. You could book two trips a month with me and come out with me two times a month for a year and not one trip would be the same. That’s just how the Bay is. In the spring we start getting our speckled trout and we start targeting those stripers in shallow water. Not your shallow water but less than 5 feet of water, my boat’s a little too big to do what you guys do, but I sure wish I could.
Using Technology to Improve Fishing
Mike: going back to our trip from the other day. One of those things that was the most interesting, was how much you use your electronics. I know this is something we touched on that day, but kind of give us a deep dive. I know you’ve got three different screens running. Your Garmon, a hummingbird with side scan and traditional down scan. Just give us some ideas on that.
Steve: The hummingbird side imaging is so good in shallow water that I’m able to mark fish out to 100 and some feet and three foot of water which is crazy. You can just tell the guys on the boat to cast over there and there is almost an immediate hook up when you’re in that shallow water. In deep water, it’s a huge advantage. It’s sort of redundant because we all were doing it down on the boat. You mark some fish on side imaging while you’re on a drift and you know you’re drifting say left to right, you see fish out to the right, you know they are going to be coming onto the boat because you keep getting closer and closer on side imaging and you see that school of fish and then I’ve got the Airmar transducer which works better in deep water. IT’s a little but more narrow. It works better in deep water.In shallow water, it’s only going to show the fish that are directly under the boat and that’s why I also run the hummingbird transducer instead of the water cone. I also run that with traditional and also the downscan. It gives me four different views of what’s under my boat and beside my boat. Fish can’t hide anywhere.
Mike: Whenever we were drifting around and looking you could see fish out to the side, and we were all jigging below us and as soon as the garmon started to light up it was instantaneous. Everyone was getting hooked up directly below the boat. But if they weren't on the screen, pitch 20 to the right or 20 feet to the left and get it just outside of the direct area and you can pick up exactly where you need to put that bait very quickly.
Jud: You can really dial it in, but the sucky thing about electronics is if you don’t see fish on the down scan or side scan, your mindset drops off really quick. I guess if you really trust your electronics, that’s true, but sometimes, like your buddy who was beside us, didn't mark anything on his side scan but still watches a big fish.
Steve: I do think you start to lean on it a little too hard, but I do trust it. There are probably fish down there and we catch on a blank screen all the time, but if you’re really looking for a pile of fish, you’re going to see them. That’s the way I fish for bull reds in the Chesapeake in the summertime. I don’t stop the boat until I see a pile of redfish. When I do stop the boat, I’m using my side scan and telling guys to cast you know 50 feet out or for dummies, we’ve gotta do left and right. I do rely on electronics especially in deeper water. When I am fishing shallow water, I use it to find structure more than finding fish, but finding fish in shallow water more away from the structure. In shallow water I am fishing structure or shoreline, and a lot of times a school of fish will pop out on the opposite side of the boat. If I didn’t have good side imaging, you wouldn’t know about it. We don’t get to sight fish much in the Chesapeake bay, but you guys might have me convinced.
Jud: We’re gonna come up there this summer and figure it out.
Steve: We see fish quite often, but it’s really hard with turbulent water so we use a lot of structure and casting old shorelines and stuff we know. There is a lot of erosion that’s taken place. We’ve lost a lot of land and islands out in the Bay but those turn into great fishing structures.
Boat Reasoning
Jud: That’s the truth. One of things I was really impressed with was your boat. A seahunter, I’ve always thought of as an off-shore boat, but the first thing I noticed when I hopped on there was the gunnel height. You could fish light tackle casting rods no problem on that boat and still have the ability to cover water well with comfort, so what brought you to that boat?
Steve: A long time of looking for the perfect boat and I think I found it for live-tackle fishing for the chesapeake bay at least. Some things I have to be able to do because our fishery is so diverse, I need to be able to fish big water and Chespeke Bay believe it or not is a bay but it’s really its own ocean when it starts blowing. IT can blow up and get really nasty out there, so I need something capable of handling rough water. I needed something capable of going into less than 2 feet of water. I fished on a 24 Bay Boat down in the Keys with a guide down there, Captain Andrew Tippler and it blew up on us and started storming one afternoon and his little bay boat going across the water in the Keys in some pretty solid chop, it was unbelievable how well that thing handled the chop and just searching and they had just started making those 28s.I was talking to him about it, and I said if this 28 rides anywhere near as good as a 24, it's bigger and heavier, it’s going to be shell of a boat and it really is. It’s a do-it-all boat. You can fish shallow, it’s fast, you get a call 15 miles away, I'm going. Even if it’s rough I know we can get there comfortable and safe. It’s also a weapon in shallow water. It’s incredible. The gunnels are at 20 inches or something all around the boat, 360, casting at the front or back, you can land fish. It’s just incredible for a boat that can still handle the rough waters that that boat can do.
Mike: I was curious, you are running 2, 300s on there?
Steve: Yeah, 2 Yamaha 300s and it will run about 55. Great reliable motors.
Mike: Would you ever consider going to a big single 450 or something but speed wise you would lose so much.
Steve: They tested a few but the boat is so heavy, but loaded it’s pushing 9,000 pounds, so I think the testing they did with a single 450 it just didn’t push it enough. I’ve got a tower on my boat too, so all the extra weight really needs the twins with a ton of horsepower.
Jud: It’s a comfortable boat to ride around in. At the end you were like which side did you see, Maryland or America? IT’s got a wrap and it’s pretty sweet.
Steve: yeah it turned out great and really my style of fishing, which seems to be very successful for me is I cover a lot of water. When we’re doing redrums too, they are a needle in a haystack. We are fishing big water. The Chesapeake at its widest point, it's nothing to put 80-100 miles on the boat in a day so having something comfortable with all the storage space and coolers and everything, is something I wanted to have for my clients and myself.
Jud: What are the chances if something were to book a trip with you in the winter for those big stripers and they wanted a 40 plus inch fish, what are the chances of it actually happening?
Steve: Chances are pretty good that somebody on the boat gets one over 40. Because I’m doing light-tackle, it’s all about the angler. It really is. When y’all came, we did two completely different tactics and you guys picked it up really quick and it worked out. You play fished in the afternoon and you caught a really nice fish in the morning. But typically, one guy on the boat at least will get one fish over 40 this time of year. If not, we’ve got tons of really good fish that are willing to bite. As we get further into winter, into February and March it’s more of a hero or zero type of trip. I’ve never had a skunk but we do have some really slow days because we’re looking at 20 degrees air temps.
Jud: That’s impressive you’ve never had a skunk because I’ve had a lot. I blame that on the fly fishing for redfish.
Steve: That’s not to say I haven’t had to hit the skunk busters and say “hey let’s just go catch something and get the skunk off the boat and then go back and look for a big fish.” People fish their entire lives to catch these fish, not because it’s a walk in the park.
Jud: That’s what’s so cool about stripers. Y’all’s fall back stripers are still 25-30 inches. It’s not hard. Stripers usually in a fishery or estuary, you’re going to find some and catch some, but coming up there to hunt for big fish isn’t just hunting for big fish in other scenarios. You’re going to catch fish, but hopefully you’;re also going to get a big one too. It’s not a big risk as an angler; if you want a big striper, the wintertime up there is the way to do it in the middle chesapeake bay.
Steve: It’s an incredible fishery. I am happy to have grown up here and figured it out. If you do the techniques and really focus on the lines and when we’re fishing for this big fish, they have such big mouths, they can slurp up a lure and spit it right out and you won’t even notice. You really have to be tuned in, have good gear and be sensitive really just waiting for the slightest touch.
Jud: Tell people how they can get up with you.
Steve: Give me a follow on instagram, I post almost daily reports. That is @griffins_guide_service and also on facebook and my website is www.griffinsguideservice.com so check me out.
Jud: Thank you so much for hoping on with us. I’ll link all of his information in the show notes. We will see y’all next week.