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How to catch Striped bass
Striped bass feed in 42–80°F water and bite best at 50–68°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 26 waters; in October they are at their peak in The Chesapeake, Long Island & the Sound, Southern New England and 18 more.
About
The striper of the St. Johns and the Panhandle rivers: a native fish stocked and treasured, schooling under the bridges and at the spillways in winter. The sunshine bass is its hatchery hybrid, in the same places.
How to fish it
The dam tailwaters and the deep river bends in winter; a live shad on a circle hook, or a jig under the bridge lights at night.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Live eelsHooked through the lips on a 5/0 to 7/0 circle hook and sight-cast to a cobia or dropped to a cobia on a ray — the eel is the cobia bait.
Menhaden (pogies)Nose-hooked on a circle hook and free-lined or slow-trolled; cut in chunks for the bottom.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
not confirmed hereBag limit and size rules differ by river system — confirm at MyFWC.
The current rule →Where it is, month by month
Atlantic striped bass are born in fresh water. Each spring, as the rivers warm into the 60s in April and May, they run up the Chesapeake's tributaries — where most of the coast's stripers are spawned — and the Hudson, the Delaware and the Roanoke to drop their eggs in moving tidal fresh water. Then the big migratory fish head north: the New Jersey and Long Island beaches in May, Cape Cod, Massachusetts Bay and the Gulf of Maine for the summer, feeding on bunker, herring and sand eels. The fall run is the main event — from late September into December the fish pour south down the coast, blitzing the Montauk and Jersey beaches, and many winter off Virginia and North Carolina. On the West Coast they're an import, stocked in San Francisco Bay in 1879, running the Delta and the Sacramento in spring. Inland, landlocked stripers and hybrids live in big reservoirs. The stock has been in a rebuilding plan — check your state before you keep one.