Race Point #458
Race Point is located at the “fist” of the proverbial “flexing arm” that makes up Cape Cod is
home to some of the Best Striped bass and blue fishing Cape Cod has to offer. It’s the very tip of
Cape Cod and is often very loaded with stripers and blues. This area very frequently has visitors
of Bluefin tuna that have been known to blast the place up. For the sake of this entry, am going
to include Herring Cove, the Pot Line and around the corner to Peaked Hill bar to describe this
area.
There are several trademark features of The Race AKA P-Town as the area is also locally known
as… For starters, the Race gets massive amounts of boat traffic. Yes, by hundreds of recreational
boats every nice Saturday in the Summer, but also by many commercial vessels targeting
mackerel, flounder, and lobster to name the first few that come to mind. It’s ideal if you can get
here very early in the morning to beat the crowds. Like Monomoy, you’ll see all the methods
being used here from Fly Fishing to wire line.
The Race is unique where a surfcaster can toss a plug into water more than 100’ deep from the
beach. Impossible to find elsewhere on Cape Cod. The water drops off from sandy beach to over
150’ in an amazingly short distance. The currents here are notoriously strong and help create a
massive rip line that is a second home for many a charter boat and recreational angler alike. Just
to the south of the Race the drop-off abuts a shallow sand flat in an area called “the Bathhouse”
named for the visible bath house facility on the beach. A slew of lobster pots run along the drop-
off and act as a road map for where to fish. Both the lobsters and the fish tend to hang along the
steep drop-off. Find the lobster pot line and watch your fish finder and you’re almost certain to
start marking fish waiting for the bait to get swept into the abyss.
Once the fish are found there are two main ways that people fish the race. First is by trolling
wire and adjusting the depth to keep the rigs or jigs in the zone the bass are suspending. The
other popular way is to fish the bass with vertical jigs. Soft rubber baits on lead heads imitating
the sand eels as well as tin/metal jigs are deadly at catching bass as they suspend on the drop off.
Simply mark them and send the jigs down to the fish and work them through the schools. When
the water is moving and the bass are eating there is no more productive way to put numbers on
the deck than this
Here’s A few Tips To Get You Started
1.) The crowds here can occasionally be unbearable but the fishing often makes up for the
chaos that occurs here at one of the Capes most popular fishing spots. That said,
sometimes the crowds can really cool down the fishing. You might encounter a time
when you KNOW the fish are there. Infect you are marking them on your fish finder…
Truly frustrating. Here’s one scenario where I cracked the code with Captain Shaun
Ruge. We were experiencing just the situation I described above. The bass were pounded
and shy. We decided to downsize our leader to minimize any chance to spook the fish
and tipped a Hogy Dancing Diamond Jig with a Hogy Sand eel, a super life like
imitation. We would mark them on the finder, and drop the Hogy Dancing Diamond Jigs
on their noses. The key was a VERY VERY slooooow jigging method. Really, the
diamond jig was there to introduce the Hogy Sand Eel to the stripers. We let the boat
rocking motion do most of the action.
2.) In this other situation, the crowding came in the form of too much bait. I had never seen
so many sand eels. Yes, there were plenty of stripers but the challenge was competing
with millions of pounds of bait. We switched over to a “secret” technique of mine called
“twitch jigging.” We would get adjacent to the school, but counter intuitively, not right
into it. I sent this sand eel jig rigged with an inline single hook down and really
“twitched” the jig. The Hogy Sand Eel Jig’s long slender body facilitates a very
pronounced action. They bait almost looks like it is vibrating. The playbook here was to
create a lot of commotion “all alone” to larger stripers that had somehow been separated
from the action. We were hoping for some sort of “FOMO” reaction strike and it worked!
It’s a go to technique of mine and almost never fails.
3.) Bird Scanning: One Grate technique here is to scan for birds with your radar, a
particularly useful skill when in the fog which happens quite a bit in Cape Cod Bay. In
this video, Capt. Terry Nugent and I, under his tactful guidance, found these big bass
keyed in on herring, which interestingly were very close by to other stripers feeding on
sand eels. Check out how we made it work.
- Lat & Long: 42°03.8’ x 70°15’
- Best tide: Outgoing
- Hazards: Very large ocean swells may be present; water may be filled with weed and
unfishable after sustained easterly wind or storms. The rip along the beach is very strong.
Seals may be a nuisance.
