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I fished the inner Patapsco on Tuesday, 8-26-14, launching at Harbor Hospital. I put-in around 9:30am to take advantage of the morning outgoing (HT-8:11am) and fished until about 2:00pm, the current was noticeable.
I caught about 8 dink stripers, one was 15”, the rest were <12”. So, no big whoop there.
But once I got out several 100 yards out from HH, my FF started showing vast schools of wperch & bait marks. The wperch were found mostly in the 9’-14’ depths. No sooner would I pass out of one big school of wperch that another school would show up on the FF. This pattern went on for a ¼ mile as long as I stayed in the 9’-14’ depths. Unfortunately, 90% of them were in the 7.5” to 9” range, just short of being big enough to keep. Only caught about 6 in the 9” to 10” range, no jumbos. All were caught on smallish white vertical jigging spoons in the 1/2oz range, looked like Hopkins shorty knock-offs. I also saw a couple schools of small, dense-packed menhaden feeding on plankton on the surface. The rippling of the water they caused (aka: nervous water) as they feed was really easy to spot even at a distance due to near dead calm conditions. In all my years of fishing this area I’ve never seen so many wperch and so much bait. Also caught a few dink blues (8"-9") that were mixed in with these schools of perch and bait.
BTW, north-bound I-95 going towards Baltimore is undergoing major road work and repaving. What a mess and looks like this work may go on for the next days/weeks. This road work starts about 1 mile before the Raven’s Stadium and really screws-up trying to exit onto Route 2 south at exit 54. If it hadn’t been for the major back-up this work caused I’da arrived at the launch 30 minutes earlier.
I caught about 8 dink stripers, one was 15”, the rest were <12”. So, no big whoop there.
But once I got out several 100 yards out from HH, my FF started showing vast schools of wperch & bait marks. The wperch were found mostly in the 9’-14’ depths. No sooner would I pass out of one big school of wperch that another school would show up on the FF. This pattern went on for a ¼ mile as long as I stayed in the 9’-14’ depths. Unfortunately, 90% of them were in the 7.5” to 9” range, just short of being big enough to keep. Only caught about 6 in the 9” to 10” range, no jumbos. All were caught on smallish white vertical jigging spoons in the 1/2oz range, looked like Hopkins shorty knock-offs. I also saw a couple schools of small, dense-packed menhaden feeding on plankton on the surface. The rippling of the water they caused (aka: nervous water) as they feed was really easy to spot even at a distance due to near dead calm conditions. In all my years of fishing this area I’ve never seen so many wperch and so much bait. Also caught a few dink blues (8"-9") that were mixed in with these schools of perch and bait.
BTW, north-bound I-95 going towards Baltimore is undergoing major road work and repaving. What a mess and looks like this work may go on for the next days/weeks. This road work starts about 1 mile before the Raven’s Stadium and really screws-up trying to exit onto Route 2 south at exit 54. If it hadn’t been for the major back-up this work caused I’da arrived at the launch 30 minutes earlier.
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