Report of some decent Striper fishing on the Cape May Rips yesterday on the 55 HU 2

[Caveman Sportfishing]

Ran to the Rips early am and fished the last of the incoming using all live spot. We opted not to fish Prissy Wick and started about 3-5 miles from that area to avoid the boat traffic. We worked various sets of no name rips that used to produce some larger stripers 7-10 years ago and the best part there was hardly any boat traffic to contend on these in the middle of nowhere rips lines and made drift fishing much easier especially when on a larger boat that often gets pushed backwards when you have tide against the wind. These out of the way rips were the most productive around the new and full moon with the harder running tides like we have this week so I opted to start yesterday’s trip away from the fleet and see if we could find some stripers without any other boats around us. Well it did not work as I drifted these no name rips for 2 hours and never had a bite on any of them so we threw in the towel and moved to a more well known rip over towards Delaware and as soon as we arrived the bite started on our first drift. We had very nice action for the remainder of the incoming and we kept what we wanted for the table and just plain had a blast using light tackle on these more than decent size stripers at least for the Rips. We did not have a fish less than 35 inches all morning and it really did surprise me how nice the size of these were yesterday. We saw a few boats fighting fish next to us and they were all using eels so we know at least on this rip it is was not necessary to use the expensive live spot. I am more than sure bucktails and sluggo’s would work also but we only used spot yesterday. There were also some boats trolling mostly with Stretch lures but it seemed they were not doing as well as the boats drifting in the general location where we were. One of those nice days fishing the rips with some real good action probably due to the hard running full moon tide. I expect to see similar action right after new moon again on Nov 16 and the rips seem to be much better this year overall from what I have been reading and hearing about compared to last year when we never fished them at all and only chunked.
We moved up the bay to the C&B area and tried chunking at the end of the outgoing but were quickly inundated with doggies so we moved inshore and half way up the 60 foot slew but never had a bite and called it a day about noon. I did hear some very good reports on the radio of at least a few boats doing quite well chunking on the incoming before we arrived so it looks like both the chunk bite and the Rips produced yesterday morning for a number of anglers. We are all about having a whole bunch of fun, lots of smiles and laughs on all our striper trips and hopefully providing our customers with at least some fish for the table on every trip plus stay warm and dry on those cold, windy, wet fall days. Having said that I will continue to try my best to get catch a few trophy bass chunking and we still offer $100.00 rebate off the price of a trip for anyone that releases a nice striper in the 35 lb plus range on our boat. All I have to do is go out and find some this size and that is always the challenge especially for an old time Rip fisherman who only started chunking a few years ago.

Not bad size stripers on light tackle for the Cape May Rips and we had some drifts with multiple hook-ups with up to three fish per drift. Lots of fun and we kept what we wanted for the table plus we had lots of fun yesterday morning.