How to Fish for Striped Bass at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

hey there folks lenny rudow here for fish dog magazine today i am out on a blustery chesapeake bay it is officially not calm people and it's tough to fish but we wanted to come out here to show you all how to fish the chesapeake bay bridges and to that end i have with me today two folks from angler sports center right back here and they are going to talk us through some tackling techniques that you can use for fishing the chesapeake bay bridges hey guys we're out here today uh with lenny rudow from fish talk and we just want to go over fishing the bay bridge so first the gear we're going to be using for our bait setups we have 4 000 size reels just a little bit bigger um we also have 30 pound line uh braided line on these uh that way if fish bring us into the pilings we can really crank the the the drag down and pull them out of there so i have an adot circle hook with a little half ounce egg sinker on there this is going to be for eels i'm going to hook the heel straight through the lips with this hook the weight is optional i don't really know what the current's doing right now so i may end up taking this off if i don't need it similar rig alex has here just standard fish finder rig this is going to be we'll probably use this for soft crabs so we have a fish finder on here we have the option of adding a weight if we need to again just where we got about like a 18 inch 24 inch leader here down to another circle hook um and yeah this is probably gonna be our soft crab rig eel rig and then we have a couple different things for jigging um first on the line for the jigs uh we've downsized to like 15 pound braid um we tie four carbon leaders straight to these 20 pound fluoro and then i have a small jig here with a one ounce jig head and then alex has a little something different no paddle tail half ounce jig head just so we can kind of try different things and see what they really are going to target today so let's see if we can go catch some fish first place we stop today at the bridge is going to be these rock piles these rock piles generally hold fish year round sometimes you just kind of got to drive around check the fish finder figure out exactly where they are we're going to jig around here at first just to cover ground quickly see if we can find the fish we picked up a couple small ones so far but hopefully we get into some better fish here [Music] [Music] [Music] sure we're catching most of our official jigs but you never know when hitting the bridge it's smart to be loaded for bear and be ready to try lots of different offerings until you find out what's working best at any given time in any given place and when we figure out where those fish are we do change things up a bit so we're still out here at the same rock pile we caught a couple more fish but just want to talk about some different things you can use there so before i had on a paddle tail with a gi jig head um i've sit i've since switched to a rain minnow so metals are good to fish we've also marked the fish in about 25 to 35 feet of water so they're down pretty deep um a one ounce metal jig like this will get down there quickly the other thing that's good lenny just caught a small blue fish a couple minutes ago and uh plastics will get destroyed by bluefish very very quickly these metal jigs will hold up uh for fish after fish after fish so just very durable and just another option like i said it gets down there very quickly and they're very effective lenny just caught one on it so now hopefully i get one too nice [Music] there it is right on the bottom oh nice hey guys so we've now moved from the rock pile and we're gonna try some of the uh what we like to call spider pilings on the north bridge so real quick i'm going to show you how to rig an eel we're going to be pitching eels and probably some soft crab at this but to start we'll just go over kind of how to rig an eel so one just kind of dropped out nicely for me there that worked out very well so i have a rag here um they're very very very slippery near impossible to actually hold on to without a rag you're definitely going to want to use a rag take that grab the eel and you're just going to take the hook and put it right out through both of its lips and that's going to be it just like that and he's nice and lively we're going to get him in the water here real quick good way to keep eels alive you don't necessarily have to keep them in water you can just keep them uh with like right here we have an old pretzel jar that lenny uh poke some holes in he just puts this right on ice um and they'll live in here for honestly a couple days just like that you don't really need to keep them in water if anything keeping them out of water and on ice is going to be the way to go you just don't want them directly on the ice so something between the eels and the ice is going to be key so let's get this thing in the water see if we catch something [Music] the answer is nope roger got a 32-incher here last week one of the old but today they go untouched so so another uh way we talked about fishing the bridge is going to be with soft crab so i'm just going to show you real quick kind of how we do this um so here you can see i have a soft crab i'm going to cut this into quarters so i just go straight down the middle and then i'll go quarter it i'm going to take a chunk of that i'm just going to put this hook through it as many times as i can which on this i'll probably only get two through it i also have some magic thread so this is just gonna help keep that soft crab on a little bit better all you really have to do with this stuff is wrap it around the hook the crab just kind of go nuts with it um it's just going to help keep it on there a whole lot better as you can see i'm just kind of going every which way i can and then snap it off and it's good to go uh so here we go i'm gonna pigeon next these pilings hopefully come up with a fish here pretty quickly nope hard to believe a striper would turn down a soft crab but nope so even though the fish we were just catching earlier were pretty dang small we go right back to pitching jigs because hey you can't crush huge fish every day and having a bent rod in the shadow of the bay bridge beats the heck out of sitting at home any day of the week [Music] don't miss another cool fish dog video click below to subscribe

Channel: FishTalk Magazine

Views: 16,265

Rating: 4.8896551 out of 5

Keywords: FishTalk, Magazine, Chesapeake, Bay, Mid-Atlantic, anglers, fishing, fishing techniques, ocean, striped bas, rockfish, how to fish, bay bridge

Id: N8FqYonAEgc

Length: 8min 9sec (489 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020