CT River Sunday with Josh Rayner

 After washing and waxing my boat, doing some work on my trailer, charging the batteries and filling up i asked myself the question.. Do i fish today?  That's stupid... of course i will. Josh text me around 3:30 pm asking if i had fished yet and i said no but i'm about too and he replies.. have a buddy? I said yea Josh Rayner and i was on my way to the mouth. 45 minutes later i was attempting to launch through the 30 boats trying to leave and finally found an opening to sneak the boat in. What an absolute zoo and the few fisherman i spoke too had terrible days out there so i didn't have high hopes. The day before i had blue skies and clear water and only managed 2 schoolies between Jonathan Weeks and I. But saw tons of fish. Well last night had one huge difference from the day before.. The same boats i was complaining about made the one change we needed without the cloud cover.  MURKY WATER!  Sounds funny because i most cases that sucks but not for stripers! We pulled up on our first spot and immediately started spooking some fish.  We had some great blow ups and rises but simply didn't hook up. Had to fish the lures really aggressively to get action and when you fish that fast they miss a lot. As i was explaining that exact thing to Josh i get blasted on the Cobra sad shad and i'm on. I was pumped after the day i had staurday to have a big fish on in the first 20 minutes. Well the excitement was short lived as the fish threw the hook on a lazy jump. Oh well!  It was then Josh's turn to hook and lose a fish. He was throwing a enormous 9 inch spook that looks almost ridiculous in the water until it gets hammered then its just bad ass!  After a minute or two the fish just threw the hooks. I said well that's out of our system lets catch some fish now.

 Few minutes later i get us on the board with a fat 35.5 inch fish on the sad shad. Was a great fight! We had a tons of rises and missed blow ups for the next half hour but decided to make a move and see if we could find some more fish willing to pull the trigger. Next spot we both had huge blow ups first cast right at the boat and next cast Josh was hooked up on the big spook. After a sketchy net job his fish was in the boat at 35.5 inches! Twin 35.5 inch fish to start the day is not too shabby. Missed a few more fish over here and decided to make a move because the nats where out of control. Over the next few hours i caught 1 more keeper at 31.5 inches and Josh got 2 more keepers at 29 and 29.5 inches. All on the sad shads. We caught a few schoolies and i had a sad shad cut in half by a blue fish and lost 2 small blues on jerk baits as it got dark. Was a fun evening trip on the river and i was happy to catch the most keepers on my boat ever and to do it with Josh in my boat was even better. We got really into this fishing thing together over the last 4 years and when there is an open seat on my boat that means Josh couldn't make it. Thanks for coming out man! Until next time!

Go to  www.cobrabait.com and pick up these sad shads! Pearl color could not be hotter right now! Tell him I sent ya  :)  Check out the video below as well as the pictures!

by: Joe Jacobowitz