By This week we spent half the week trailering the boat from the Merrimack River to Boston Harbor to the lower Cape and Martha’s Vineyard. The fishing has really slowed down over the past week and in some cases took live bait to get moving.
Northshore – Merrimack River, Plum Island, Joppa Flats, etc
There has been good bird activity over the flats on the outgoing that are keyed into a smaller profile baitfish that I didn’t get a good look at. Olive over white clousers were the key to enticing the stripers under them to bite but they were all in the smaller range of 12-16″.
Mackerel were easy to find outside the mouth of the Merrimack and live lining them inside again produced some fish up to the 26″ range.
Boston Harbor
With the SW winds that have been around, the water temps in Boston Harbor have really dropped. We found locations with water temps as low as high 40s! The winds died down, the temps came up, and the sun started blaring making the conditions for humans ideal – but the fishing pretty much shut down. We ended the day that day with 3 on the fly and 4 misses (or lost boat side) up to around 20″.
Lower Cape and Islands
Wood’s Hole was crowded when we arrived and the boats running the channels was making conditions less than ideal for us. Some boats around us hooked up but we took off pretty quickly and started to explore the Elizabeth Islands. Marking some fish really down deep, outside of the range of fly gear, we moved on again to fish the rips off MV and Waquoit. They were crowded but there were stripers up to around 30″ busting out of the rips chasing squid. We got a couple follows that stopped short of the boat and a nice 26″ that took off like a train on light tackle. Pink Hogy Originals were the ticket on weighted swimbait hooks.
Tight Lines,
– Captain Nick