Spring Street Signs

About a week and a half ago, I was driving my son to baseball practice when we passed one of the more prolific local herring runs. Despite nearly two feet of snow blanketing the ground, my thoughts immediately jumped to herring—and the striped bass that will soon be feeding not far from that very stretch of road. I mentioned it to my son, and he admitted he’d been thinking about herring, too. He asked if we could start checking for them soon.

Poking around the half-dozen runs within a short drive of home is one of our favorite spring rituals. We usually begin too early, finding little more than cold water and empty current. But one year we hit it just right—or so it seemed. In the second week of March, that same stream was practically overflowing with spring gold. Nothing in the weather stood out to explain their early arrival. Later, I learned it turned out to be a low-count year at that run, and I suspect many fish pushed through before the counter was even installed—something my early visit seemed to confirm.

Two days after baseball practice, while walking the dog, I noticed a small patch of exposed mud and flattened grass where the wind had scoured the snow down to almost nothing. Before the dog could get to work, I spotted several green shoots breaking through last fall’s debris—the first snowdrops of the season.

Those two moments quietly hijacked my thoughts for days. I sat down at the fly bench intending to restock the spring trout box and instead tied a half-dozen oversized herring patterns. An email from a musky-focused tackle shop in Wisconsin had me scrolling jerkbait inventories for herring imitators. And when I finally resolved to clean my office, I wound up digging through plug bins and bags of soft plastics, building a spring bag instead of taming the chaos.

As I write this, true spring striper fishing—on fresh arrivals, not holdovers—is still at least a month away for me. There’s snow to melt, gear to prep, and plans to hatch. With the 2026 surf season on the horizon, now feels like the right time to revisit fishing around herring runs—a topic we covered back in Season 2, Episode 14.