By With the reports of bonito and king mackerel in, we had to go see if we could get in on the action. Regretfully with those reports also came a forecast of 10 days of straight thunderstorms. We decided to change it and make the trip anyways and abort at the ramp if we saw lightning. Luckily for us, the lighting stayed in small pockets mostly over Martha’s Vineyard leaving the lower cape windy, but sunny and nice otherwise.
We found blues, stripers, black sea bass, scup, fluke, and even threw in a sea robin for good measure but didn’t hook up with any bonito or kings. The cocktail blue blitzes are still everywhere you look and any rocky structure with current has been holding schoolie stripers. You could catch the blues with light tackle or flies until your arm fell off they’re so plentiful and aggressive right now. Anything durable enough to handle their teeth like the Hogy Epoxies, smaller Deadly Dicks, or Crippled herring seemed to work just fine with pink all flash flies on 20# Rio wirebite doing the damage on the fly. We did hit up some of the ledges after giving up for bonito and jigged up some nice 20″ black sea bass and even had a nice 29″ striper hit a Rapala X-Rap being trolled for kings.
Bait is everywhere and includes peanut bunker, silversides, and whiting. Most of the blitzes we saw and the blues that spit their food back up at us seemed to be either peanuts or silversides.
That’s OK, we’ll be back to find those bonito once we have some nicer weather windows to work with.
Tight Lines,
– Captain Nick