What you can't see can hurt you

There's no such thing as too much fishing, though lately I've been coming close to the saturation point where one trip blends into the next. Over the last week, friends and I have fished both fresh and saltwater in four different states for large and smallmouth bass, northern pike (in three of those states), tiger muskies (but failed to connect), pickerel, sunfish, fluke, bluefish, blue crabs and striped bass. That's a major angler's binge, if there's ever been one.

• There is not enough room here to relate all the stories, so we'll go with the most pertinent, which took place last Wednesday during a striper fishing trip with my lifelong buddy, Bruce Guyot, and his sons, Mark and Luke. It was a beautiful, calm evening, so the trip to the reefs and Fishers Island was fast and dry.
• Right off the bat, to the east of Wicopesset Island, we spotted diving terns and surfacing fish. They proved to be school stripers that were feeding on something small that was just under the surface. They were keyed in so intently on whatever it was that all but one of the hundreds of visible surfacing stripers totally ignored our offerings.
• We were facing predatory fish feeding on a tiny, but superabundant food source, one we call the "no-see-ums," a situation that can be difficult to deal with. Realizing our efforts were futile, we went searching for a place where these little bugs were not so concentrated, so we'd have a better chance of catching a few stripers or bluefish.
• Every year sometime in July or early August, a free living species of isopod that is in the class Crustacea (along with lobster and crabs), comes out in force. They swarm near the surface, by the millions, in what is probably a spawning event. When this takes place, they attract the attention of a large percentage of the stripers and other species away from their normal prey, making standard fishing methods nearly ineffective in areas where these "no-see-um's" collect.
• These tiny critters were so thick last Wednesday that Luke actually snagged a big one on the point of a hook. I keyed out in a great reference, "Marine Animals of Southern New England and New York," by Howard Weiss as a Valiferan isopod. This particular isopod is a small, multi segmented, grayish-tan organism, about the size of a pencil eraser that looks similar to the pill bugs or armadillo bugs that live in damp places, such as under rotting logs. At other times, in other areas, similar swarms of lobster larvae, crab larvae and other members of the huge and very diverse Phylum Arthropoda have the same sort of negative effect on catch rates wherever they occur.
• These annual events are nothing new. Captain Don Cameron of Captain Don's Tackle on Route 1 in Charleston, R.I., says he remembers seeing and hearing about no-see-um's frustrating anglers 30 or 40 years ago.
• When these incredibly abundant organisms swarm, striped bass and other species target them for an easy meal. It is like trout fishing during a mayfly hatch. The natural bait is so abundant and the predators focus in on them so intently, they ignore everything else. The dilution factor, where the real thing outnumbers flies or lures by hundreds or thousands to one, makes it nearly impossible to catch a fish. Exciting, but often very frustrating, angling experiences are the end result.
• About a decade ago, while trolling a tube and worm along the south side of Fishers Island, we constantly saw the noses, dorsal fins and tails of surface-feeding stripers that would spook at the approach of the boat, then reform a short distance off the stern, after we passed.
• A week earlier, trolling with Fish Connection red licorice tubes was producing 15 to 30 stripers per outing, up to about 30 pounds. On this night, when the bass were feeding on no-see-um's, all we had to show for our efforts was a couple of small schoolies and a bluefish. At one point, a striper of about 20 pounds came swimming lazily towards the boat, mouth gaping about halfway open. It totally ignored the lures and even a whole live sandworm that were cast and pulled right in front of its nose. It changed direction and lazily swam right through a cloud of the small, insect-like organisms I'd noticed earlier that evening around floating mats of eel grass. Finally, it spooked when a soft plastic lure it normally would have slurped down landed too close.
• Putting two-and-two together, it became obvious as to what was taking place. Those striped bass that normally hit our tubes with wild abandon were filter feeding on those little isopods that are so small they're difficult to identify and even see. I'd been dealing with this phenomenon for years without completely realizing exactly what was happening and why suddenly, for two or three weeks, the fishing would become less productive, despite the presence of many often visible fish in the area.
• As of Wednesday, no-see-um's included a sand worm hatch and lobster larvae along the south shore beaches of Rhode Island, according to Captain Don's. (Bob Sampson, Jr, Norwich Bulletin).