Martyn White | Thursday, 14 November 2024
Seabass time is upon us. Hawaiian Dave and I went out for my first night of the season on Monday and it was good. Going to work on Tuesday morning was less good, but the fishing was worth it.
This time of year is when the scad and gizzard shad are running in Tokyo Bay and it's a great time to pick up the bigger and best conditioned fish of the season. It's also the hardest time to get a boat, meaning Dave and I booked up in July as the calendar was filling up already. It also meant we couldn't pick the best tide, so we had a bit of a slow start while we waited for it to start moving. There was plenty of bait around, but the bass were only feeding very sporadically, and we only picked up couple over the first hour or so. We kept ourselves amused by watching the bioluminescent plankton (first time I've seen it), which looked amazing to the eye but sadly didn't really show up in the photos.
Once the tide started running the bass switched on. And we found fish feeding around the platforms and some ships anchored out in the bay. Surprisingly though, all the action was on small stuff. When we were in areas with large schools of shad, we had the big flies on, but got nothing more than the odd lazy chase to the boat. It's surprising how much you can see from the boat at night, but the plankton really helped spot the fish following. Unfortunately, it didn't help us convert them to eats. I did try to figure 8 one boatside, but I actually think the plankton stopped that working as the motion of the rod swishing through the water caused it all to light up. Oh well. Basically, we think there was just so much bait around that the bass were full and following more out of habit than intent.
I other areas we were able to pick up more fish on small flies. We couldn't really see a great deal of small bait, but there was some around and enough bass focusing on them to keep us busy for a few hours. One advantage of this is it's much easier on you, I’d expected to be casting a 9" fly on 10weights all night but ended up using the #6 most of the time with a surf candy under 2" long. Much more comfortable.
We've got another night coming soon, also booked in July. But we'll be more able to pick our dates better come December when all the guys who only fish the easy 5 weeks of the shad run are gone.