Cape Cod Fishing Report: 5/15/2024
I finally managed to find the motivation to get the boat in the water for the first time this season and enjoyed what can best be described as an interesting day of fishing in Woods Hole and Naushon, along with a couple of brief detours to the rip off Nobska and over Middle Ground way.
Phil Stanton was good enough to send me some photos of quality bass taken from what I can presume were the waters of the Hole and perhaps down the Elizabeths since he and his guests spend a lot of time fishing these waters. Although snapping wire is a common early season technique used around these parts, Phil mentioned that they were casting; along with bucktails and topwater plugs, one of Phil’s favorite lures is a large plastic Finnish style swimmer in what some folks call clown and others label Wonderbread, but basically it is pearl with splotches of red, blue, and yellow. This color pattern is used both by smaller custom wood plug makers and the large manufacturers of plastic lures and it should be noted that the level of brightness of the three colors mentioned above can vary widely from one builder to another, with the one Phil uses tends towards more a faded look on a white pearl background.
I had no illusions that I would have the same success that Phil and company enjoyed, mainly because we are in the midst of the migration and a school of fish can move in on one tide and be gone the other, especially in the Hole.
I also got an inkling from a post this week from Bob Lewis that the rips might be on the slow side, perhaps due to what some folks are calling a tough squid season so far and squid are a major part of the fishing scene in Woods Hole, especially in May and June when larger fish are targeting larger squid. From what I could gather, he hit at least one rip down in the section of Nantucket Sound somewhere between Mashpee and Osterville, but it wasn’t until Bob went back up inside the Three Bays area that he found some fish that Olivia and Grace could use as part of their research into catch-and-release survival and mortality in striped bass.
When Gary and I got into the Hole on a stage of the falling tide where if we ended up catching any fish, I would have expected it to be then. We didn’t raise any fish using what Mike calls the Boulder Fields & Reefs Casting Approach; if you were to invent a fishing scenario which calls for this strategy, Woods Hole is it. We used both the Charter Grade Popper and a couple of different smaller white/bone spooks, but did not raise a fish.
On a positive note, there were gulls acting “birdy” all over the Hole, almost as if they were anticipating some action or were seeing things in the water that escaped us. It was the same at both rips we visited, with gulls doing the “fits and start” thing and other than a couple of half hearted swings at the Charter Grade Popper at MG, very little was happening.
At that point, I elected to run back over to the Elizabeths in hopes of perhaps running into some fish feeding on the dropping tide in either Robinson’s or Quick’s. I guess my thinking might make more sense if the current was running from Buzzards Bay into the Holes, thereby drawing bait and the bass with it. That said, it is not uncommon for bass to move along the Vineyard Sound shoreline, herding bait on one tide, before reversing direction and staying on the feed.
Call it luck or just playing a hunch, but we found terns, tiny bait, and bass all the way from Tarpaulin to just shy of Robinson’s and another angler was good enogh to tell us the fish had been going off in that Hole in a big way as well.
For the next several hours, we picked at fish using everything from spooks to small soft plastics to small Finnish style minnow plugs. I knew the fish were on small bait, but I didn’t realize how small until a tern got tangled in my line and spit up some micro bait as I was getting it free.
I honestly don’t know what the bait was, but it was micro, perhaps an inch in length, and I was left thinking that perhaps we had encountered what folks have been talking about in upper Buzzards Bay, namely large schools of bass feeding on small, juvenile sand eels, with birds making it clear where the action is.
The fish certainly weren’t spooky, but it still made sense to use a Surface Blitz Approach; in this case, there were waves of bass moving down with the tide, so instead of chasing a school that we had just been fishing, we slid outside the path the fish seemed to be taking and let the group come to us, drifting along with them and getting plenty of casts at them as they moved from in tight to shoreline and then out into open water.
One of my goals this season is to follow the Hogy playbook of limiting what I bring on the boat; I did reduce my four Hogy Mesh Crate Bags down to two, but in retrospect after reading this report, I have to figure out some way of making sure I have some Hogy Slow Tails on board. They might have been just the ticket with so much small bait around, giving the impression of concentrations of bait without a lot of forward movement.