For many years my buddy and I would fish the mouth of the Harlem River at the point where it enters the Hudson. It is the primary migration point for stripers returning to the river from their summer haunts in New England and Long Island Sound. Action usually started to pick up around Labor Day or a bit earlier. Why so early is still a mystery, at least to me, the fish were for the most part shorts with an occasional school of keeper sized and bigger fish. I can recall several instances of thirty pounders being taken at that location but most of the hookups with decent fish ended with a frayed line and resultant lost fish from too much contact with the bridge supports and icebreakers. Again the lure of choice was the white bucktail weighing between 3/4 and 1 ounce without a trailer. The fact that we did not use some kind of jig trailers had nothing to do with effectiveness, no one up there used them. In retrospect it was probably to our disadvantage. To give the reader an indication of the volume of migration activity, I can recall making fifteen casts and taking fourteen bass, including a tagged fish from, as I recall, the Hudson River Foundation.
One early morning as I was walking along the tracks to take up my usual position at the edge of the railroad bridge, I came across one of the regulars working what I later learned was a Creek Chub Popper along the northern edge of the icebreaker. This was an entirely new technique for me and I was quite surprised when a nice schoolie nailed the popper after boiling a few times behind it. The fish had been taken on a one half ounce blue back, whitish silver bellied creek Chub Popper, and was followed shortly thereafter by several more fish including a nice bluefish of about five or six pounds. I subsequently learned that they would also nail banana colored poppers, but to this day, given a choice I’ll go to a creek Chub with a blue top. A few years ago, I hit the jackpot when I came across an inventory closeout and got 1/2 ounce Creek Chubs for two dollars each.
As I began to "learn the ropes" of this new technique, it became common for a small group of us to meet at dawn in the early fall and work the incoming water around the railroad bridge and the big icebreaker which was just a bit north of the bridge. Ideal conditions included a gray over-cast morning, an incoming tide about three hours into the flow, little or no wind and a hot cup of coffee! While there would be an occasional breaking fish, it was not something that occurred with any degree of regularity, however, if the above conditions were there you could reasonably expect a good morning. Sometimes however, those critters had to be coaxed!
The most effective method we found was to cast our poppers very close together and retrieve them in unison. To the bass it must have seemed like a small group of baitfish were passing overhead, because when we couldn't buy a hit, that little trick almost always turned them on. I can still see the swirls and blasts that three or four poppers retrieved close together could trigger. This could get pretty wild if the migration was in full swing. My friend the teacher had a fifty-seven bass morning, while my personal best was fifty-two schoolies with an occasional ten or twelve-pounder. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the area we fished was the natural pathway for bass returning to the river to winter over. Next time we'll visit the other end of the pipeline where Long Island Sound "necks down" to accommodate the migration.
