For the long weekend, OTW Staffers fanned out from Cuttyhunk to Race Point in search of fall run stripers. I stayed somewhere in the middle, hitting the Canal, the Outer Cape and the South Side. With the fish on the move during the fall run, fishermen have two options – stick it out at a productive place where they know the fish will eventually move through, or bounce around to actively hunt down the fish.
Each strategy has its merits. Regularly checking a known productive area is definitely the safer bet. Though there might be long stretches of inactivity, when the fish finally show, you will be there.
When bouncing around to find the fish, you run the risk of missing them entirely, like I did last fall. I was trying to check on some 12 different areas, and heard more times than I care to recall, “You shoulda been here yesterday.” The allure of chasing down the fish is that you could potentially avoid the periods of inactivity . In reality, you’ll likely blank at most places, but will eventually hit it right and cross paths with a southbound school. Intimate knowledge of how areas fish under certain conditions will help you chose your spots wisely.
But at most of the places I fish, I lack this knowledge, so when I was headed to an unfamiliar backside beach on Saturday night, I planned my trip to fish a couple hours either side of low tide. Without 12 hours to invest in fishing out both the incoming and the outgoing tide, I hoped a couple hours of each tide would paint a pretty good picture of when I would want to fish there in the future.
I arrived to find the fishing red hot for 20 minutes until the tide dropped below the sandbar the fish were feeding on. My first ten casts hooked eight fish to 20 pounds, and my next one-hundred casts hooked nothing. With the sandbar exposed, the fish scattered to parts unknown, never returning on the incoming tide. Though I wish I’d gotten there about two hours earlier, I learned some valuable information for future trips to this beach. Danny plugs did all the damage. Steve McKenna wrote an article on fishing metal lips in the February 2012 Issue of On The Water where he mentioned Danny plugs as one of his favorite plugs for swimming through white-water. I’d always thought of them as calm-water lures, but since taking Steve’s advice, I’ve been catching more fish on Danny plugs than I ever have in the past.
From the Outer Cape, I drove to Falmouth to fish the south side after I accepted that the fish weren’t moving back in. The ponds and harbors have been full of bait, and the albies have certainly taken notice. Every day for the past month, false albacore have been running up and down the sound, blitzing on a number of different baitfish species. My hope was that after dark, the bass are moving in to eat these same baits closer to shore.
When looking for where to fish on the South Side, I wanted to find an area that serves as a bottleneck to migrating baitfish, making them easy pickings for the stripers. This happens at points or the harbor and pond outflows, and while I thought I’d chosen wisely, my minnow-style plugs went untouched. Other than the usual spearing, I didn’t see anything noteworthy in the way of baitfish. A few cold nights ought to flush some more baits out of the backwaters, which I hope will pick up the fishing on the South Side and sustain it into November.
The rest of the OTW Crew found a few fish, but overall, reported the weekend fishing as slow. Nevertheless, it’s not always about the catching. The Cuttyhunk group had a great weekend exploring the island and winding down after a hectic StriperFest.
The fall run happens in bursts, and this weekend was definitely an intermission between waves of migrating fish. The tides are getting stronger as we near the new moon, some stormy weather is on the way, and we should see a strong finish to the 2012 fall run over the next two weeks.