Heavy plugs and jigs are top producers that can be tossed beyond the wash in heavy surf.

Some of the most beautiful surf you’ll ever fish stretches from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod. Twice each year striped bass make their migration, swimming within range of surf casters of all persuasions.

The fish travel north in the spring as they leave Albemarle, Currituck and Pamlico sounds, the Chesapeake and Delaware bays and the Hudson River. In the fall they follow the same path south to winter quarters.

You’ll find stripers on three types of beaches. There are gentle slope, where swells from offshore gradually build and then crest and crash well before reaching the beach. A beach with a steep dropoff, on the other hand, bears the full brunt of offshore swells that move shoreward and break directly onto the sand. Then there are beaches with parallel sandbars, which are separated by deep cuts or holes, providing access inside the bars to the deep troughs laden with forage.

Fly Casting in the Surf The single biggest obstacles to fly casting from the beach are an onshore wind and extremely rough surf. As such I’ve learned to fly fish only when conditions warrant. Look for a relatively calm surf and offshore wind, which often brings the stripers right into the wash, where a 75-foot or even shorter cast is adequate. Most surf fly fishers employ a 9- or 10-weight outfit, but I’ve come to favor a particular fast-action 8-weight pack rod, that I use in conjunction with a 9-weight 400-grain high-density sinking line. You don’t need the 12-foot leaders used while seeking permit, bones or spooky stripers on the flats. A 6-footer is more than adequate and advantageous. Always wear a stripping basket, or breaking waves will wash 30 or 40 feet of line around your waders. Limit yourself to a half-dozen patterns, period. My fly pouch includes a Popovics popping bug, a couple of 1/0 or 2/0 Clouser Minnows, tied in brown-and-white with gold Mylar, and chartreuse-and-white with silver Mylar, a couple Lefty’s Deceivers or Half & Half’s, a Popovics Surf Candy and a Menhaden fly. This says it all, and quite honestly I have gone weeks without changing from the Clouser or Surf Candy, so effective are these flies, for they resemble the tiny fry on which stripers feed. Stay out of the water and don’t be wading into the exact spot where stripers are apt to be feeding. Execute a roll cast, pull back and double haul once, and shoot the line. Importantly, don’t begin stripping in a customary way with your line hand. Instead, as the line drops in, tuck the rod handle under your armpit, and begin a hand-over-hand retrieve while feeding the line into the stripping basket. Work the fly right through the rough water near the beach until it slides right onto the sand, then execute a pickup and shoot it again. With this kind of retrieve you’ve always got control of the fly, and it’s not listlessly being pushed around by the waves. When a striper inhales it, you’ll know it! The first couple of times you’ll panic as you try to get control of the rod handle with loose line screaming through your fingers, but you’ll quickly get the hang of letting the rod handle slide down into your casting hand. Quite often along the coast from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the ocean is at its quietest just before dawn and with the approach of dusk. I make it a point of being on the beach an hour before first light, and just begin doing my thing. With first light you’ll often see the gulls dimpling and picking just a few yards from the beach, as that’s where the mullet, spearing or other tasty morsels are swimming. Soon you’ll see large swirls, and often you’ll see those striped beauties vault into the air. It’s then you realize it was worthwhile setting that alarm. —M.R.

Each beach configuration requires a different cast. On a gently sloping beach cast the bait beyond where waves are cresting, for as the water recedes from the churning wave it is exposing forage. On a beach with a steep dropoff, where you can go in over your head when you step off the shelf, a rather short cast works best, for the stripers often move within 50 feet of the sand to feed on the forage that collects on the bottom at the edge of the shelf.

Where there is a bar formation, concentrate your effort on a low tide by wading through the trough and standing on the sandbar and casting seaward. As the tide floods, fish your bait in the rising deep water in the holes or cuts between the bars and in the troughs inside the bars.

Veteran striper addicts regularly reconnoiter the beach at dead low tide, selecting days when there is an offshore wind resulting in calm surf. In this way they can view the bottom, determine where the baitfish and other forage are apt to be, which is impossible to do at high tide or at night.

Baitfishing Tactics

I fish stripers with artificial lures primarily, but mix in bait fishing during the spring and early summer, when forage of the year is not available. Top natural baits include clams, crabs, sand fleas, squid, marine worms and chunk baits of herring, menhaden and mackerel. At this time stripers are often feeding along the bottom.

As you move into late summer, the fry of such forage species as mullet, bay anchovies, menhaden, herring and others begin to vacate the bay and river nursery areas, and begin to move along the surf, which makes them a target for lures that resemble these species.

A good bait rig that I regularly employ can easily be tied from a 4-foot-long piece of 30-pound-test fluorocarbon leader material. Tie a duo-lock snap at one end of the leader, and a small barrel swivel at the other. Next, tie a pair of dropper loops several inches from either end of the leader, so they extend out from the leader six to eight inches. Complete the rig by slipping a 5/0 through 7/0 size Claw, Octopus or Beak style hook with a baitholder shank onto each dropper loop. I pass the hook through the loop twice, and pull it up snug, which prevents it from slipping. Just tie the rig to the end of your line, and snap a pyramid style sinker of sufficient weight to hold bottom (three to six ounces is adequate) to the end of the leader, and you’re all set to go.

What makes this rig particularly effective in the surf is that the baited hooks follow the sinker during the cast, which minimizes tangles so often encountered where the leader of other rigs often wraps around the line as the cast is executed.

One of my favorite baits is the surf clam, which I obtain either by picking them off the beach at low tide after a northeast storm, or purchasing them at a coastal tackle shop. The meat of surf clams is soft, so I’ll often shuck them, and place them in a brine solution of half fresh water and half coarse cooking salt, which toughens the meat.

Crabs, especially in the soft or shedder state, are excellent bait, and here, too, half of a large crab works fine. With marine worms such as sandworms and bloodworms, thread two worms on the hook, so they remain alive, trailing from the hook enticingly, not balled up. A squid head with its trailing tentacles is still another great bait.