The appearance of "micro bait" has led to correspondingly small flies.

MOST OF the guides and professional fly tiers I know would likely make good Boy Scouts. They are always prepared. And they seem continuously able to adapt to changing conditions when others cannot. Granted, these guys fish for a living, but they can do that because they pay close attention to even the subtlest changes out on the water. A professional guide’s or tier’s success rate is directly linked to his or her ability to pick up on shifting patterns — both short and long term.

Over the past 25 years, one of the most important trends for saltwater fly fishermen from Maine to North Carolina has been the slowly diminishing size of forage fish along the eastern seaboard. Back in the 1970s, it was common to see stripers, bluefish, and weakfish eating pre-adult or adult baitfish. Large bunker, tinker mackerel, Atlantic herrings, butterfish, Lafayettes, striped mullet, whiting, smelts, and sand eels were the major portion of most game fishes’ diets. These prey baits ranged anywhere from 6 to 14 inches, which is the main reason that conventional surf fishermen of yesteryear used huge lures such as the Atom 40s and large bottle plugs. On the fly-fishing front, Massachusetts tier Bill Catherwood saw the need for big saltwater flies as far back as the late 1940s, which eventually led to the evolution of his aptly named “Giant Killer” series.

Spearing that once averaged 4 to 6 inches are now 2 to 4 inches.

David Skok photo (www.dwskok.com)

By the late 1980s, however, the days of mondo forage fish were waning. We still had our large bunker and others, but observant anglers noted that sand eels along our beaches were more in the 3- to 5-inch range; juvenile or “peanut” bunker started showing up in droves; silversides and baby blueback herring runs were becoming the prey of choice from Massachusetts to Connecticut; New York and New Jersey anglers began keying on finger mullet.

While conventional fishermen threw lures, such as 51⁄2-inch Red Fins and Rebels, it was obvious that a new age was upon us fly fishers, as well. Bob Clouser’s Deep Minnow and Bob Popovics’s Surf Candy made the scene, brought to us by just two of the many pioneering fishermen who had the acumen to pick up on this downsizing as it happened.

Yet another change became apparent around the dawn of the new millennium: Our now thriving populations of juvenile forage fish appeared to be getting even smaller. Today, sand eels along the beaches are generally 1 to 3 inches long. Bay anchovies tend to run 1 to 2 inches throughout the fall, while peanut bunker from 1 to 3 inches school by the millions in August and September. For the past three years, we have also seen more free-floating crabs, as well as some “micro” baitfish that many of us anglers simply cannot identify. We just figure it is some sort of fry.

Baby Bunny Bunker

Hook: Tiemco 811S size 2 or 4.
Thread: Danville mono .006 (fine).
Abdomen Frame: 12- to 20-pound-test Mason mono. Tie mono in from back to front on top of the shank. Tie in the eyes, and then loop mono back and tie in at the bend.
Eyes: 3/16 or larger dumbbells with size 2 silver-and-black prismatic stick-on.
Tail: Small pearl Mylar.
Abdomen: Devcon 5-minute epoxy with pearl glitter dabbed into void between mono and hook shank.
Wing: Zonker strip pinned onto hook bend, tied behind eye and trimmed.

Note: The size of your epoxy abdomen will determine how heavy a dumbbell eye to use.

The most compelling part of this phenomenon is the number of blitzes along the migratory path that now focus on such minuscule prey. Over the past few years, I have heard from many anglers who have had a difficult time putting up big numbers on these bite-size baits. I have witnessed a few of those days myself, and it can be frustrating. But in order to figure out how to deal with this latest paradigm shift, it is useful to first understand its origins.

Dave Molnar is a marine fisheries biologists with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He studies many of our inshore forage and game-fish species and can confirm that this latest shift toward smaller baitfish is verifiable by more than just anecdotal observations from anglers.

“Our forage fish along the coast have a short life cycle,” says Molnar. “They are highly fecund animals that live two to three years and have the ability to spawn throughout an entire season (spring through the end of summer). Weather can be the key element in determining how often this will happen, and over the past three to four years we have been experiencing cool, wet springs. This allows forage fish to have a better and longer spawning season due to more nutrients in the ecosystem.”

According to Molnar, the young-of-the-year index (YOY) for most forage fish has been sky high for the past three years, which partially explains why we as fishermen are seeing so much more activity on small baitfish. When asked about the lack of larger baitfish that we used to see in our waters, Molnar has two theories. “The first might be both a combination of industrial and commercial catch along our inshore waters. The second might be that these big baits are simply taking a different path out to sea and not migrating along our coast as in the past,” he says.

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