Cape Cod Fishing Reports

Cape Cod Fishing Report: 6/1/2024

Wasque

If there is one thing that is consistent right now it’s the inconsistency of the wind direction that last several days and it looks like it is going to continue into this week. This morning, it was southeast, but it’s now gone around southwest before shifting to west tonight and northwest tomorrow in the AM and finally moving around to east in the afternoon. Later in the week, the forecast has winds out of the south for several days. With conditions changing all the time, it’s important to remember that wind direction and intensity in relation to current direction – in this case coming from opposing directions – can stand a rip line right up and create great fishing or if they are going in the same direction, this can flatten a rip right out.

With lots of high sunshine this weekend and a lack of bait right in the rips from what I gathered from a number of reliable sources, a lot of folks elected to make the run to Wasque where both tides continued to produce a lot of bass. The squid fleet that creates a cluster when they return to the Falmouth Harbor boat ramp around first light appear to be doing pretty well with their nighttime jigging activity and the waters down along East Beach and around the corner to the point are holding some good concentrations of squid and happy bass as well.

This area is a flyrodders delight as there is just so much water to swing a fly, as Bob Lewis and his nephews experienced today. One big advantage of the structure thereabouts is in places the current will move you from one rip line to another, giving the captain a chance to do some fishing as well rather than always running the boat to keep it positioned properly ahead of the rip.

Cape Cod Fishing Report: 5/30/2024

Buzzard’s Bay – Canal – Cape Cod Bay

Just got off the phone with Mark Tenerowicz who was paddling back to the ramp from one of his favorite spots in upper Buzzards Bay around Fairhaven and he said the topwater action was phenomenal. He was sitting in his kayak and looking around at bass blitzes in every direction and today they were far less fussy and willing to take topwater plugs, including the smaller Hogy Charter Grade Popper. He also threw a small heavily weighted needlefish type plug in amber that sounded an awful like the Hogy Surface Eraser, which Capt. Mike introduced last fall and proved to be a gamechanger, with many of the attributes of a soft plastic in terms of movement, but it casts much farther and you can work it at different levels of the water column without having to add weight through some sort of rigging. There was no indication that the fish were feeding on anything different than the microbait – one to two-inch skinny silver baitfish – than they have been, but most likely the overcast, rainy conditions and wind direction made them far less fussy than they were in the calm, high bright sunshine yesterday.

I really want some identification on this small bait, so if anyone gets a good photo of it, I would appreciate it your sending it to me so I can send it off to a fisheries person who can solve the mystery for me.

In another case of fussy fish on microbait, Connor Swartz from Red Top in Buzzards Bay admitted that he and his buddy resorted to using the fly rod after being frustrated by the bass feeding on whatever this stuff is up inside Phinney’s Harbor. They had tried all kinds of plugs and soft plastics, but it took a small tubing/epoxy pattern sold at the shop – and a little work on the casting – to get some of these fish on the line.

Cape Cod Fishing Report: 5/29/2024

I hate to sound like a broken record, but I guess if you do the same thing for a number of days in the same locations and the fish continue to cooperate, then that’s the way it goes.

This morning was the third and final day of my trips with Tom Bishop and Irwin Chu, who shared the boat on our last two days with their great nephew, Thomas Sheehan, and the bass action just might have been the most consistent we have experienced during these annual gatherings that start just before Memorial Day and conclude the week after.

Each day we fished some combination of Nobska, Woods Hole, and the Vineyard side of Vineyard Sound – as opposed to the waters more towards the Elizabeths – and we never switched over from the Hogy Charter Grade Popper (CGP) as the fish just couldn’t leave them alone. The one change we made today was using the Albie Crack color (basically a white plug) as well as the amber and the fish gave us their opinion: they like them both equally. Whether that was a result of today featuring sunny, brighter, and warmer conditions while our first two days were cool, cloudy, and sometimes downright foggy, I couldn’t say. Today we were fishing from the middle of the dropping tide/west current at Nobska and it was kind of “silly” fishing since there seemed to be an unlimited number of bass that I guessed were just a bit shy of or in the slot limit (28 to less than 31-inches), with the occasional over slot fish.