Pictured above: Heavy-duty rods, reels and line are needed to tame big bass such as this one taken by the author aboard the Ave Maria.
Troll up super-sized stripers with live mackerel.
I’m not sure you would have called it raining cats and dogs, but I swear I saw a few chipmunks and maybe a squirrel fall from the heavens during the deluge. As I sloshed my way to the gangway overlooking Bay Pointe Marina in Quincy, a highly anticipated angling adventure with Captain Mike Bousaleh of Ave Maria Charters was beginning to look doubtful. But the skipper had other ideas; the “apps” on his smart phone called for a fast-moving front, and in case I needed any nudging, he dropped this bomb: “We’re headed to the same place we caught a 47-pounder on a live mackerel yesterday!”
Mike asked me a very rhetorical question. “You don’t mind getting a little wet do you?” He would prove to be dead-on accurate about a lot of things that day, including the weather forecast. The skies cleared, the bite was on, and the only “wet” we experienced was from the tail slapping of stripers as they were being released.
If you’ve set your sights beyond simply catching “keepahs” and would like to catch 30-pound-plus “cows” – and just maybe a “nifty-fifty” striper of a lifetime – then one of the most effective ways to accomplish this is with a live mackerel during the month of June. For thousands of years, striped bass have migrated north from their nascent watersheds in perfect synch with the arrival of baitfish that help fuel their journey. Stripers are nothing if not opportunists and will prey upon a host of species along the route, but in these parts, I’ll argue that it is the mackerel that is the most important early season forage.
Sure, you will find some decent stripers prowling around rivers on the hunt for river herring and out in the bays chasing down sea herring, but there’s a difference between a 25-pounder and a 40-pounder! There are exceptions, but in the midst of the migration, the largest linesiders along our coast will remain in deeper water, and it’s no coincidence that is where the highest concentrations of mackerel are.
From the South Shore of Massachusetts through the North Shore, mackerel first appear around Mother’s Day and generally linger until Father’s Day. There are aberrations, however; last year there were scads of macks present in harbors and bays well into August. But it’s a far different game in the middle of the summer, when bass become “residents” and big fish will have developed established feeding patterns, which usually consist of sulking in deep water by day and then storming the shoreline come dark. But the mackerel that tend to linger are far smaller than the early-season migrants. You can still catch plenty of bass with the smaller mackerel, but those fish will tend to be significantly smaller and live-lining or trolling mackerel loses its luster as the most effective method for catching big bass.
Another appealing aspect of the mackerel fishing in June is that it is probably your best chance of catching that killer bass during daylight. Other deadly big bass methods tend to be nighttime pursuits, which is not for everybody. “I know I could catch big fish after dark, but most patrons want to see what they are catching,” admitted Captain Mike Bousaleh. “It never gets old seeing a charter’s expression when the broad back of a four-foot long striper comes into view!” Most striped bass will not have established a summertime routine in June as they will still be on the move, and when they’re cruising, they seldom pass up mackerel.
Your quest for those big June bass begins with finding the mackerel. And where you find the mackerel, you will often find the stripers, but not always. Captain Mike feels that the mackerel whereabouts changes slightly every season but a good place to start your search is by structure that borders deeper water. Ledges, upwellings, drastic depth changes and eddies are all places to look. Good electronics certainly help with the search, but a change in underwater structure as deep as 30 feet is often belied by a surface disturbance that is apparent to the naked eye and looks different than surrounding water. Eddies that reflect tidal movement over structure will appear as pockets of still water in the middle of a wash. The bait and bass can be in water anywhere between 20 and 80 feet, but in deeper water the fish are more likely to be suspended. “I’ll seldom find stripers in water deeper than thirty-seven feet, even if I’m trolling over water twice that deep,” noted Mike.
Historic hot spots on the South Shore that harbor mackerel and bass are off The Gurnet in Plymouth and Minot Ledge and the “21 Can” off the Scituate/Cohasset area. Closer to the Hub, you should check out the smattering of ledges off Hull such as Ultonia Ledge, Martins Ledge, Thieves Ledge and Three and One-Half Fathom. Off Boston you’ll often find mackerel between Graves Light and the B-Buoy, and farther north, Nahant is always a good bet.
First light is prime time to find the mackerel; you’ll often see them dimpling the surface of the water at this time. When the mackerel are concentrated and in plain view, you can score a livewell full in almost no time if you’re capable with a cast net. Still, the most common approach to acquiring mackerel is the Sabiki rig. A little trick that Captain Mike employs is to end the rig with a hookless Butterfly-style jig. The flash of the jig will often lure the mackerel in from quite a way, and the lack of hook means there’s less chance of making a donation to Davy Jones’s locker. If mackerel are a tough find, you’d do best trolling for them until you find a school.
There will be no shortage of anglers offering live mackerel to stripers this June, but few will catch truly big fish because most will simply live-line the bait where it is caught. “If bass are bugging mackerel, you’ll know it,” said Captain Mike. The bait will be tightly balled up, it might be pushed to the surface, and of course, diving birds will give a blitz away. A mackerel tossed into the bedlam or even an artificial lure will work when the fish are frenzied as such. In fact it was just such a scenario that resulted in one of Mike’s top bass last year. On that day there was all kinds of surface activity, which prompted Mike to urge his charter to grab a spinning rod. Armed with only 10-pound test of questionable vintage and a heck of a lot of luck, the angler lobbed a soft-plastic Cocahoe Minnow into the mayhem and was rewarded with a 48-pound, 8-ounce striper!
But should the demeanor of the mackerel be casual, and if they are spread out on your fishfinder and no bass appear to be in view, than it is time to troll to find those bass. The bass are often close by; they may be hunkering downtide of some nearby structure or a drop-off. As a rule of thumb, you’ll do your best work if you troll with the current as the bass will usually be facing into the flow.
But here’s where trolling with mackerel differs from almost any other type of big bass trolling or drifting – you don’t necessarily have to be right on the bottom. Anyone who has fished eels or bucktail jigs on three-way rigs or crawled Danny-style plugs into nighttime linesider lairs will tell you it’s crucial to have your offering within a few feet of the bottom. Mackerel will often be suspended, so it is more important to identify with where the bait is holding than it is to present near the bottom. If you’re marking what looks like mackerel at a certain depth, you’ll want to present your mackerel as close to the bait schools as possible. Don’t fret if you’re a little off. Stripers, even the biggest ones, will pursue a mackerel for a greater distance than any other bait. It makes you really believe that bass thirst for mackerel above all other forage.
This is not a place for finesse fishing tackle. Captain Mike’s gear choice is old school. Big beefy rods and Daiwa Saltist 50 conventional reels are standard issue aboard the Ave Maria, as is 50-pound-test Jinkai monofilament and VMC 6X 3/0 treble hooks. Mike saddles his mackerel with a tandem treble-hook rig, with one hook through the nostrils and the other behind the dorsal fin. Upon impact, Mike immediately sets up on the fish, and of the many times I’ve accompanied Mike, I seldom have seen a gut-hook. Stripers usually grab the bait head-first, and the points immediately gain purchase in the fish’s maw.
One of the reasons that Mike uses a tandem-treble setup is that he often encounters jumbo bluefish. Unlike stripers, these 15-pound beasts have a nasty habit of striking the rear half of the mackerel. The tandem-hook rig converts chopped bait into caught choppers.
The tandem-treble rig is made up of about 40 inches of 60- to 80-pound-test fluorocarbon leader. Should blues be present, Mike will lean toward the heavier leader. The terminal end of the leader is tied to a treble via a clinch knot that is hooked onto the mackerel behind the dorsal fin. About a foot beyond this hook, another treble is attached to the leader with a Palomar knot, and the latter is hooked to the mackerel through the nostrils. The leader is connected to the main line by a bead-chain trolling sinker of anywhere between 4 and 12 ounces, with 8 used most frequently. The chain sinker swivels and prevents the line from tangling or kinking, a definite concern when connected to a big bass. The finished length of the leader, from chain to end hook, is about 3 feet long. Captain Mike ties up to 50 leaders in advance of a trip because when the bite is on, he doesn’t want to have to retie leaders that have been bitten through.
Captain Mike has found that by counting out seconds when free-spooling matters. How shy the stripers are varies depending on time of day, degree of sunshine and sea conditions. “If the mackerel is getting whacked fourteen seconds behind the boat, I’ll put all my lines there,” pointed out Mike. The captain varies his count anywhere between 10 and 18 seconds. It’s those little things that often add up to big bass.
You should always have a back-up plan in case you can’t find the mackerel. Trolling plugs can be a good safety net should the mackerel be in short supply. There are a number of good ones on the market, but I’ve seen Sebile’s Koolie Minnows in action and they are deadly. And considering some models can scratch the bottom over 50 feet down, you’ll have no need for leadcore, wire line or additional weighting.