Massachusetts Fishing Report- December 8, 2022

My friend Jan Flaherty refers to the malady as “fish brain”. She should know, her husband Dave certainly has it. The “it” could be described as an overriding compulsion to divide life into two categories – fishing time and everything else. If you really have it bad, then right now panfish should be your top targets.

Two buddies of mine have that hopeless affliction and because of that have created a conundrum for yours truly. Captain Carl Vinning has been whipping numbers and size of white perch which would give any angler pause. Moreover another pal – Steve Langton – has been crushing crappie. Thankfully they have both put out the welcome mat for me but I haven’t been sure which way to turn. Obviously I have it tough!

While drastically different species the one thing they in common is that anglers catching them tend to grin a lot. Another similarity is that they bunch up where there are aggregates of bait. One of those bait biomasses is river herring fry. If you follow the runs of alewives and bluebacks you might be thinking, “hey this is December – herring fry, come on!”. That’s what I always thought but with summer long droughts and 50 degree days the norm, herring fry are sticking around in heretofore unheard of numbers and the windfall is fantastic fishing for white perch and black crappie!

Both of these species are low light opportunists with dusk to dawn periods more effective than bluebird daylight. The hard-fighting white perch behave similar to their bigger seven-striped cousins and will follow/push bait schools while crappie exhibit more subtle behavior and lurk below the forage waiting to ambush.

Before even taking a predawn cast, Captain Carl scans the surface looking for signs of “rain bait”. Steve on the other hand has antifreeze in his veins, and in spite of it being December, launches his yak. With one eye on his Humminbird side scan he looks for bait balls/suspended crappie or – hopefully – both! Carl fishes a float/jig combination that he works like a puppet under the deft touch of a marionette as he slowly crawls it in, twitching it periodically. When a white wallops your wares you know it. Steve slowly and vertically pounds a jig/soft plastic over the crappie schools and watches his rod tip as much as his electronics in order to detect the faint hit of a December crappie.

While the techniques are heavy on going slow, the catching can be instantaneous as these guys have repeatedly racked up 20, 30+ fish outings! Carl is quite the teacher as I found out while accompanying him on a recent trip. The catching was fish-per-cast insanity with more than a flew slab white perch in the mix. I must confess, however, that I was working my panfish secret weapon – TTI Blakemore’s Road Runner. When targeting white perch, crappie and bull bluegills this thing is all I use. The combination of a blade, jighead and soft plastic makes it almost feel like I’m cheating.

That’s the thing about panfish; they may not pull drag but when you find the fish and present the right offering to them the action can be non-stop! I’d say that gives you a leg up on most of the other guys who suffer from “fish brain” in December!

Pete from Belsan Bait and Tackle in Scituate shared with me his top South Shore panfish picks for December: Jacobs Pond, Scituate Reservoir, Cohasset Reservoir and Lilly Pond. Should you know of a herring run headwater on the South Shore (or anywhere for that matter) that holds panfish, then that is the place you want to be now!

Lisa from Fore River Fishing Tackle in Quincy listed Whitman’s Pond in Weymouth as a possible place to catch a few pig panfish. What qualifies this pond is that it is the headwater of the Weymouth Back River herring run. While “closed” water, Sunset Lake and Popes Pond deserve honorable mentions.

Pete Santini of Fishing FINatics in Everett called out the Charles River, Mystic River and Horn Pond as all potential hot spots for a panfish bite. Horn is unheralded as being a recent headwater of the Mystic run. Anglers frequenting that place are seeing much healthier panfish, bass, pickerel and trout thanks to the influx of river herring.

Pete is nothing if not a trout fan and would be remiss if he didn’t mention the quality trout fishing happening at White Pond and Walden Pond in Concord. He recently texted me a shop shot of one of his customers holding a big brown trout, brook trout and rainbow that he caught at one of those ponds on a blown-up crawler! One look at that pic had me thinking that there was at least one Masswildlife “pin” in there somewhere!

Things are quiet on the North Shore according to Jim from Bridge Road Bait and Tackle in Salisbury but there is that little old herring headwater known as Lake Chebacco which has been known to give up big crappie! The other northern option is the mighty Merrimack River which has an impressive white perch fishery. Where the “mack” mixes in with it’s tributaries at the Spicket River and Shawsheen River is where the whites pile up. If you’re not afraid of crossing the border into Great Bay, our most prolific salter white perch fishery awaits in the Exeter/Squamscott Rivers.

A metaphor that you’re grandfather knew well to describe slow business was the “Maytag Repairman”. The gist was that the company appliances were so reliable that there wasn’t much doing in the repair department. A week removed from the closing of the Chu’ for the season, Eddie of B&A Bait and Tackle Co. in West Boylston can relate! However, there are interesting options in that area where you’ll find fish and few fishermen. A trout top pick is Comet Pond in Hubbardston where anglers are still catching a mixture of trout species from the fall stocking! He mentioned the boat ramp area as among the better bets. For crappie, Indian Lake gets the nod, the added bonus being that it’s also renowned for pike! A few other standout panfish picks are Moosehorn Pond, South Meadow Pond and Maple Springs Pond.

Knowing Rodney from Flagg’s Fly and Tackle in Orange as I do, I wasn’t surprised when he offered up Lake Mattawa for white perch and North Spectacle for crappie. What I was really interested in was the Connecticut River. He tipped me off to The Oxbow as gems for crappie and white perch. This spot also gives up bigger game such as pike and walleye. It is also one of the better bets for bowfin in Massachusetts. Two other multi-specise producers along the Connecticut River area are Barton Cove and the Hinsdale New Hampshire setbacks.

Massachusetts Fishing Forecast

Decembers certainly aren’t what they used to be! At the risk of coming across like “Jurassic Joe”, skim ice was usually the nemesis of freshwater anglers who wanted to keep busy during the twelfth month. With nothing even remotely like that on the horizon, we might as well settle down and enjoy the open water options. Foremost of those options just might be panfish and the dynamic duo in these parts are white perch and crappie!