Depending on your feelings on ice fishing, you’re either loving this winter or hating it. The good bass, pickerel, and trout fishing is continuing, and not much is likely to change until the stocking trucks start rolling in about a month.
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 some holdover stripers hunkered down in the tidal rivers if you’re willing to go look for them.
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, especially on warmer days, as will largemouth bass. Jerkbaits will be the 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.
Water levels in the ponds are so high that flyfishing is tricky…..little or no room for backcasts….have to fish parallel to shore and wade as deep as possible
You are so right and wading deeper makes it so much colder.
Yes it’s been rough flyfishing for me too.
Where would be a good place to start looking for white perch and what should I use for lures or bait
I have been hitting them in most tidal rivers mid cape. Try to get as far up the river as you can. As far as lures go I have been fly fishing and doing well. Any small jugs, small jerkbaits, or spinners should do the trick