how much weight do you use

Saltwater Striper Fishing
1

Summer is here. The water is hot as ####. When you peel off line prior to sending the BB down deep, what size weight and length of leader do you use?
I have stayed with 20 in. floro leader, and a 2 oz weight, but am toying with going heavier, to get it down faster.
Any thoughts?

chris scout 202 john150

2

chrisg, I seem to do better using the smallest weight I can to get the bait down in a reasonable amount of time . Leader lengths ? anywhere from your 20 inchs to 4 feet .
Free lining might give you a surprize too , those fish will sometimes come up a long ways to eat your bait. In the early fall at keowee while fishing for largemouth and spots we were using minnows ( lazy fishing ) in 60 feet of water. Well we were getting one here and one there and several times we would take a half dead minnow off the hook and throw it in the lake , well I would see fish on the depth finder come up form the deep and then …explode on that minnow.
go figure …
Sometimes they die no matter how fast or how deep you put em … e

3

Is it true that 2oz. seems to be the all around best weight?

poe400
05’ Pioneer 197 Sportfish

4

Some of the fisherman at Murray have been using 3 oz. weights just to get BB down to thermocline faster during this hot spell.

5

This is sort of related to this topic.

I striper fished on Murray a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t have any trouble keeping my BB alive in the bait tank, just added some ice along, but they were dying real fast after I put them down. I was using 2 oz weights and trying to get them down as fast as I could but I wasn’t getting the job done.

Are there some tricks for getting the bait down in the heat without killing them??

Thanks for the help.

6

Fishingpox… strip off the amount of line to your desired depth, this will prevent you from having to count pulls for the line depth. Then hook him and drop him down.
You say you put ice in the tank. If it was chlorinated water that made the ice, your fish started stressed out. Most guys I know use a frozen soda bottle of water to keep the tank temp cool
Just my $.02

chris scout 202 john150

7

Thanks ChrisG,
I said ice but I was actually using frozen 20oz drink bottles.

Basically you are saying that I need to pull the line off before baiting up so that I can drop it down faster.

I wasn’t sure if it was the warm water at the top or the colder water below the thermicline that was killing them. I even considered keeping my tank water even cooler.

Thanks for the input.

8

You got it. Pull it off first, then bait and drop it in. Faster down is better. Had a friend walking around the boat with bb, then wondered why it wouldn’t swim!
Consider peeling off the line, then drop it in and walk the bair to where you want the rod in the boat (after the bait is at the depth you wnat it to fish

Hope this helps

chris scout 202 john150