The sun was setting on a small Rhode Island cove, and I could tell that tomorrow would be a real scorcher. A southwest wind blew over my left shoulder, and the water was beginning to drop out of the cove. It flowed out and over a long cobble bar, then over a mussel bed, and onward toward the open ocean.

Kenney Abrames has adapted freshwater presentations and techniques from trout and salmon fishing for the Northest salt that allow him to use floating lines, multiple flies, and even strike indicators to catch fish wehn no one else can. The effectiveness of his traditional flatwing fly designs has proven that lead eyes and epoxy are not always necessary components of saltwater flies.

I had the company of another fisherman. I looked at the blue heron and thought of a trout stream that I fished many times, many years ago. The stripers were holding in the same familiar places that the trout did in that stream. Two saltwater feeding lanes formed where a big rock split the current into paths of slightly faster water that carried bait downtide. There was a shallow riffle over the cobble, and a smooth slick of a run where it was wider and deeper. When I dipped my little net into the water, I pulled out silversides, sand eels, and some small clam worms. I probably missed a variety of other bait.

I had been casting up- and across-stream with little success, so I tied a three-fly dropper rig with a Razzle Dazzle as the point fly, a Ray's Fly Flatwing as the second fly, and a Clam Worm on the top dropper and added a split-shot to my leader. I cast, and mended my line to dead-drift the flies. As my line came tight at the end of the drift, a striped bass took, and I thought I had a big fish. I discovered when I was finally able to land the fish that I actually had two bass and they were working in tandem.

I was not dissapointed.

You can fish for stripers many ways and each fishing situation requires different tactics. A growing number of fly fishermen are discovering traditional freshwater fly-fishing methods such as mending techniques developed for fishing river currents and fishing multiple flies in the salt. Kenney Abrames has been a student and a teacher of these methods for several decades.

Abrames is a native Rhode Islander who comes from a long line of Yankee fishermen. He is an artist, writer, fly designer, and a retired charter boat captain who knows the importance of understanding fish and baitfish patterns. He is also one of the early members of the Rhody Fly Rodders, a fly-fishing group formed in Rhode Island in the early 1960s.

Tom Keer is the Northeast Regional Editor of FLY FISHERMAN. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.