One of the great benefits to guiding is having the time to explore new waters during slower times of the year. Thanksgiving to Christmas is usually a slower time for me. People are focused on hunting and their holiday preparations, but what many people should know is that it can be one of the best times of the year to catch stripers in all of our rivers and areas where we typically target them. The bite on the Pamlico and lower Tar has been steady since November. The lower Roanoke bite is firing off and showing really good signs of shaping up to be a great winter season. I’ve also been hearing great reports from all over the Albemarle Sound. My goal is to start really focusing on stripers more in November and December and having options to fish different bodies of water is always a good thing for my customers. As we continue to ramp up this portion of our business, I hope all of you will consider some late fall striper fishing here before the Christmas Holiday and also next year around this time.
Today I went exploring one of these new, really out-of-the-way areas looking to expand our options for late fall and winter stripers, and let me tell you, we definitely have options. We have all kinds of options from the high volume catching in between the cypress and tupelo lined banks of the Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge to the remote backwaters of the lower Albemarle Sound’s tributaries. We go places that are rarely visited by humans and are still as wild as they were before Europeans arrived. There’s a certain appeal to fishing these types of areas.
We ended up with a pretty catch of stripers up to 23.5 inches. The 30 inchers eluded us today, but we know they’re there. Stay tuned for more on this.
