Besides the hundred or so tires pried from the bottom of the Upper Delaware during last month’s annual “Get Trashed” river clean-up, something else emerged from the depths that day: reports of stripers – lots of them, and big ones, too. Guides in driftboats, tires piled four-deep in their bows, saw them holding in deeper pools, readily visible in the midday sun. So did volunteers in kayaks lugging garbage bags filled with plastic bottles, mismatched flip-flops, and other river jetsam. At the post clean-up pig roast, you could still hear people talking about them. “Did you see all those bass?” someone would say. “Fifteen pounds easy. EASY,” someone else would answer.
But seeing striped bass in the Upper Delaware is one thing, catching them is another. Stripers up here are like finned unicorns – at least when it comes to hooking and landing one. Many anglers regularly spot them – a small school holding below a riffle over here, or in the bucket of a deep pool over there, but rarely do they wind up on the end of one’s line except maybe by accident.
My own history with Upper Delaware stripers is typical. Last spring, while fighting a decent brown in the lower West Branch, I saw a greenish shape appear behind the trout as it held in the current. The shape materialized into a two-foot-long striper that acted more curious than hungry. The big fish casually swam off just before I netted the trout. A decade-and-a-half earlier, my friend Jim Leedom, casting downstream of me during a March Brown spinner fall, hooked something that took him into his backing and around a bend. He came back ten minutes later shaking his head. “Twenty-three-inch striper,” he said, “Sipped a spinner. Thought it was a five-pound brown” We both stood there staring at the Delaware with newfound awe. History lesson over.
Admittedly though, I had never expressly targeted stripers in the upper river. It’s hard forsaking thick, twenty-inch wild trout rising to all-you-can-gulp hatches just to cast for a fish that no one seems to catch. And besides, I can chase all the bass I want along Jersey shore beaches come fall, when they blitz on peanut bunker and sand eels.
But then my friend Chris Calabrese from Housefly fishing, which organizes Get Trashed each year, floated the river a few nights after the clean-up gunning for those big stripers. He didn’t hook any but told me he spooked some very large fish cruising in shallow water. That was enough for me.
The following week I began preparations to catch an Upper Delaware unicorn. I knew I would need to fish at night, and I didn’t mean last light. More like midnight long after the river has shaken off all vestiges of daylight, when those notoriously nocturnal stripers would presumably feed. To get them to eat, I would cast large, saltwater flies. A mighty striper wants a meal-with-all-the trimmings, March Brown spinners notwithstanding. So, I filled a fly box with dark and bulky concoctions tied on hooks that ended with /0. I swapped out my tapered leader for straight shot of stout 20-pound Maxima. And since my baseline goal was to not fall in or worse, I readied a good headlamp and wading staff. With my car packed, I sipped coffee after dinner, waiting for what I perceived to be the magic hour.
It was time. I drove along the river, the winding two-lane feeling particularly empty lonely with normally busy access points devoid of anglers. I pulled down a dead-end dirt road, parked, and shut off my headlights. There, beneath a thick forest canopy, the true darkness of the night revealed itself. Crickets called around me while I tentatively made my way to the edge of a wide, slow pool using my headlamp. When I clicked it off, blackness swallowed me.
Under a moonless sky and with little light pollution, a billion stars stared down. Across the river, a pair of barred owls traded calls from black, forested hills. Water gurgled around a submerged boulder on the far shore.
I began casting a black and purple Tarpon Toad – just a rabbit strip tail, marabou collar, and body of synthetic fibers clipped into a blockish shape. But it’s meaty and pushes water, which is often the key to night fishing. Twenty minutes in, the line came tight, and something wallowed in front of me. There was little by way of a fight, so I knew it couldn’t be a striper or even a trout. I was correct. An inauspicious foot-long fallfish planed into my waiting hand. Fallfish fed at night? Who knew?
For the next hour I methodically worked the same 100 yards of shoreline. Cast, swing, step, repeat. Then I’d rotate back to the top and start over. Occasionally I heard a gentle swirl somewhere in the flow and could even make out a few subtle v-wakes in the shallows, but no violent crashing of bait pushed by feeding stripers. Still, it was pleasant, rhythmic fishing, reminiscent of swinging flies for Atlantic salmon – and with the same null-set result.
After a while I switched to a black Tabory's Snake Fly, a go-to striper pattern that has produced for me in backbays from Sandy Hook to Block Island. It's tied with a clipped deer hair head, marabou body, and an ostrich herl tail along with some flashabou. A few casts in, the line tightened followed again by another wallow. Yes, another fallfish, though this one a few inches longer than the last.
I lengthened my cast and attempted to swing the fly through some deeper water. The line jolted followed by a leap. Trout. After another jump and a short run, I slid a 16-inch brown into the shallows. As I backed out the hook, I heard a larger splash and bait scatter somewhere out there in the darkness. Striper? I kept casting for another 30 minutes, but the brown would turn out to be the last fish of the session. The only other action came from the other side of the river in the form of a freight train creaking and rumbling and seeming to light up the entire valley. The train slowly passed and a few minutes later I heard its whistle echo off the mountains. Then it became silent except for the river’s gentle hiss. I reeled up, and made my way back to the car, oddly satisfied even though my target species remained elusive. When you hunt for unicorns, it turns out it’s not all about the unicorn.
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