Narragansett Bay was our destination today – and the mighty striped bass that call the Ocean State’s water home.  But the old man of the sea didn’t cooperate today.   It rained 2 inches overnight and the already record rains for this month were added to once again.  But it was the winds that would bring small craft advisories into the forefront and prevent us from going out with Jim White of White Ghost Charters.  What to do?  What to do? 

My first thought was to try to find a tail water river that wouldn’t be impacted significantly by excessive runoff from the rains this week.  Bingo – 25 miles to the southwest of us was the Wood River – the #1 trout fishery in the State.  It was also reported to have bass and pickerel in some of the back waters.  We asked Jim White if he could recommend a put-in location for our SeaEagle inflatable Foldcat boat – “The Plan B”.  He suggested we target Wyoming Pond.

When we arrived at Wyoming Pond – which is actually just a wide stretch of water on Wood River we were pleasantly surprised.  This water looked good.  It was an exciting challenge and we were up for it.

If you’ve never seen someone deploy a FoldCat boat it is actually quite amazing.  Literally 10 minutes is all it takes to go from your trunk to the water.  It is probably the best fishing equipment I’ll never be without again.

We weren’t exactly sure what to try for – trout, bass, pike, perch.  So we began an assault on our tackle box to see if we could get any action as we switched from lure to lure looking for a sign.  Taylor got a fish to blow-up on his Rapala top water lure first, but before long he was back to his proven Vibrax Blue Fox #3 (Gold).  Bingo – he had two nice largemouth bass in the boat before our first hour was up.  We weren’t sure if there were trout holding in deeper water so we decided to settle for the warm guys and head for the backwater.  It started paying off by the as we began to get some top water action on various floating rapalas.  It wasn’t a world record day – but anytime you show up on a stretch of water you’ve never seen before, not knowing what fish are present, and catch something, you feel pretty good.  Two largemouth, 4 chain pickerel and 1 sunfish.  I caught 3 and Taylor caught 4.  He has now beaten me 8 days in a row.  Our Skins count is Dad (18) and Taylor (14) with 5 States to go.  Taylor also closed the gap between us to just 16 fish.  

Dad (346 fish); Taylor (330 fish) with a Grand Total of 675 fish to date.

On the drive down to New Jersey Taylor had the wheel when we hit New York City and had the pleasure of driving through during rush hour.  I think it left a lasting impression.

Tomorrow marks our final double header day as we tackle New Jersey in the morning and Delaware in the evening.   We're catching our second wind which we'll need for tomorrow as it will be a 20 hour day.