Plug Bag Ins and Outs, Striper 2024
The striped bass are coming. I feel like Paul Revere, ready to ride my horse (2012 4Runner) through quaint northern New England towns and shout the news for all to hear. Except it’s not the British I can’t wait to catch, its migratory striped bass, arriving from their winter haunts down south. This year I have big ambitions for the striper season, but before they get here in force, I need to spend some serious time organizing my tackle and figure out what is staying and what is getting donated to my oft light-walleted younger brother. I don’t know exactly what the end product will look like, but I have a general idea of what I’m going to lean on hard in terms of tackle this season. Lets take a look at the ins and outs:
IN: Sebile Magic Swimmer. This plug kicks so much ass. I remember seeing jointed swimming plugs as a kid, and thinking how gimmicky they looked. If you were unfortunate enough to have one (people love giving me bad fishing Christmas presents), then you could watch it swim sadly through the water column, like some mortally wounded pheasant spiraling towards confused death. The Sebile Magic Swimmer looks at the jointed plug concept with the brilliant, French engineering mind of Patrick Sebile (No, it doesnt swim backwards in retreat). Joking aside, they make this plug in multiple sizes and patterns, and offer floating and sinking trim packages. They are bulky, but it’s worth having at least two options in the plug bag. This summer it will be a 7inch in mackerel or pollock flavor, and a 9 inch in bronze to imitate pogies (bunker for you poor bastards in the tristate area). My biggest fish of 2023 (46 inches 35 pounds) came from a 9 inch Magic Swimmer in two feet of water.
OUT: Pencil Poppers. Just hear me out here. I went to college in Rhode Island. I cut my teeth fishing with some of the best surfcasters in the Northeast who showed me time and time again how effective the pencil popper can be. I have caught hundreds of stripers on the classic pencils. Here is the thing, they simply do not work well for me in Maine. I don’t know why, but they don’t elicit nearly as many strikes for me as a spook style popper. I’m not saying that I wont use them, I certainly will. But my plug bag has 7 slots for plugs, and the pencil isn’t making the starting lineup this year. The Rebel Jumpin’ Minnow and the now famous Doc plugs are more fun to fish, and they drive stripers out of their minds. I’ll save the pencil poppers for the fall run in the deep south (RI and Connecticut).
IN: Pink. Fourth grade Grady used to wear a shirt that said “tough guys wear pink”. 27 year old Grady is going to get a shirt that says “tough guys are going to expand their color choice when it comes to striped bass lures and consider pink to be a really effective option”. Last summer I was spearfishing for flounder when I saw a long pink soft plastic stuck in a rock. It was a 12 inch GT eel in bright bubblegum pink. Well I brought it home, rigged it with a weightless belly hook, and headed back to that same spot in the evening. It took about 6 casts for me to pull a respectable 20 pound fish out of the rocks. I’m super guilty of leaning on white for almost every fishing application. For every 10 types of soft plastic I own, 9 of them are probably white. But this season I’m going to use other colors, and pink is the highest on the list. That GT eel caught about 6 nice fish before it eventually fell off during a fight.
IN: Metal Lip Swimmers. If you are a big striper guy or gal, you’ve seen the resurgence of the metal lipped swimmers. I’m happy to jump on this trend, because they are just plain old fun. It’s really cool to see a very modern fishing community fall back in love with a very classic plug. New England has a bunch of super talented plug makers, and during the offseason I picked up several handmade metal lips. This season I’m going to challenge myself to learn how to effectively fish them. There is no doubt that metal lips have accounted for a fair share of 50 pound fish, so it seems worthwhile to devote some serious time to them.
At the end of the day, my plug bag is going to look pretty similar to previous iterations. I’ll have a plastic divider box loaded with different sizes of bucktails, soft plastics, and my hook file. I’ll try and keep it diverse with the different shapes and colors, but we all know it will mostly be white pintails and 4 inch salt shaker minnows. I’ll devote a slot to tins and epoxy jigs because it doesn’t feel right leaving home without them. My plugs slots will have long sluggos and GT eels, SP minnows, spooks, metal lip swimmers, and magic swimmers. And last but not least I’ll have a couple of three eyed squid (snagging hooks) for if the pogies decide to grace us with their heavenly presence this summer. Bring it on!
-Grady
