Above: Dan Jones of the Goose Hummock landed this beautiful tiger trout last week.
With a warm-up on tap for the weekend, Cape Cod anglers are continuing to enjoy open-water fishing for trout, pickerel, and bass with little chance of any skim ice to contend with.
Stocked kettle ponds like Grews in Falmouth, Peters in Sandwich, Mashpee-Wakeby, and Cliff Pond in Brewster are producing mostly rainbow trout (stocked in the fall). Some of the ponds are also turning out bonus browns and tiger trout. Both live shiners and lures, like stickbaits, tube jigs, and Wooly Bugger flies are working.
White perch are schooled up and feeding in brackish waters around the Cape, and there are probably some holdover stripers hunkered down in the tidal rivers – but we haven’t seen any photo evidence yet this winter. There may be some mackerel in the East End of the Canal, along with some small harbor pollock, for the fishermen willing to go out and toss around a Sabiki rig.
In the meantime, we’ll be thinking warm thoughts, getting out for trout, keeping an eye on the Rhode Island headboat cod reports and the Maine Ice Fishing reports.
Fishing Forecast for Cape Cod
As the temperature fluctuates, the fishing will too. Warmer days will fire up the trout fishing, especially in the afternoons. Use flies and lures you can retrieve slowly and keep off the bottom, like tube and marabou jigs, stickbaits, and lighter spoons. Pickerel will continue to bite well, but the November and early December feeding frenzy will be winding down. There will be slow periods between windows of intense feeding, so on some days, you’ll just have to wait out the bite. Incoming weather will put bass, pickerel, and trout on the feed, in the same way that an approaching storm fires up the striped bass bite.