Summer's End Surfcasting (Outer Cape Report)

With the vast majority of traffic heading off-Cape at the end of a windy Labor Day weekend, Kevin Blinkoff and I loaded up the truck and headed out Route 6. Our destination was the Cape Cod National Seashore, where we’d hoped to find some stripers taking a cue from the tourists that summer was over and it was time to get moving.

After a little more than an hour of driving, we parked the car and strapped on our waders and plug bags. We had a little more than a mile of walking ahead of us to get to a stretch of beach we hoped would be full of fish and free of fishermen. A few days of onshore wind had hopefully been enough to drive baitfish and stripers right onto the beach, and the thought of big bass in the first wave put an extra hop in my step. Maybe 30 minutes later, we found what we were looking for. A small bowl flanked by a sandbar extending diagonally off the beach. The wind was blowing around 15 knots, strong enough to drive some fish onto the beach, but not so strong as to hinder casting. I clipped on a Daiwa SP Minnow and let fly with my first cast. By the time I picked up the slack, the plug got slammed.  I fought the fish for a minute before the hooks pulled, but a shot at redemption came on the next cast. This fish came right to the surface and I could just make out the whitewater it made as it thrashed on the surface.

“There’s a bunch right here!” I tried to shout to Kevin who was just making his first cast 20 yards down the beach, but my words were blown away by the wind.  It didn’t matter, Kevin connected on his first cast with a 7-inch Mambo Minnow. My fish dragged me down the beach, running parallel to shore. I was able to steer it into the white water and from there it was a matter of waiting for a helpful wave to deposit the fish onto the sand for me.  A big roller moved in and I put some extra heat on the fish. Unable to fight both me and the surf, the bass washed up about 15 feet away.

One of my favorite moments in surfcasting is when that wave recedes and leaves the fish high and dry. On a dark, moonless night, all you can make out is a dark shape on the sand, occasionally kicking its tail. Until you are right on top of the fish with the light on it, it’s impossible to gauge the size, but in that instant when they first wash up, they all look big to me.

I made my way to the dark shape kicking on the wet sand, hoping to get there before a wave could reclaim the fish. When I flicked on my light, a well fed 40-inch bass looked back at me. Kevin saw me put the fish on my Boga Grip and walked down to check it out.

The fish weighed 25 pounds, the biggest bass I’ve caught on the Outer Cape in about 6 years.  I was eager to get the fish back into the water and see if there were any more of that size.

On the next cast, I hooked what felt like a bigger fish, but an overlooked nick in my leader gave way about 10 inches from the swivel and I was forced to re-rig in the midst of this incredible action. I cut a new length of 30-pound-test Seaguar fluorocarbon, tied on a Breakaway snap and clipped on a small custom needle I’d picked up at the Asbury Park Fishing Club Flea Market back in March. Though I can’t recall the name of the builder, the plug looks great and casts very well. I hooked a 15-pounder on my first cast after re-rigging and another good fish after that. The hits weren’t immediate like they were with the floating SP Minnow, and I began to wonder if I was fishing below the fish with this sinking needle.  I switched to another color SP Minnow and the good fishing continued with small keeper-sized fish. Up the beach, Kevin had swapped out his Mambo Minnow for a newly reintroduced metal-lip Surfster plug from Creek Chub Lure company. Kevin was having the same success as I was, and for the first 45 minutes, I don’t think either of us went an entire cast without at least a bump. The size of the fish fell off and the bite slowed to the point that hits were coming every third or fourth cast. We decided that perhaps the main body of fish have moved up the beach, so we walked 50 yards up the beach  and started casting again. We’d found more fish, but this school consisted of mostly 22- to 26-inchers, so we pressed on.

We stopped every once in a while to test the waters, but kept moving until some structure jumped out at us. As we moved north, the sand bars and structure gave way to relatively featureless water. We fished for a bit without any luck and then decided to double back.

Kevin found the fish next, almost by accident. He had given up on a cast and was quickly reeling a Super Strike pre-loaded Super “N” Fish back to make another cast, and a fish slammed it. Kevin tried a fast retrieve on his next cast and had the same result. I had been slowly crawling a Daiwa SP minnow across the surface, but hadn’t had any luck. I clipped on a Super Strike loaded needle and started reeling “too fast” and was into a fish within two casts. These fish were all between 26 and 30 inches, but at one point Kevin tied into one much bigger. After feeling the hook, the fish tore off line at a breakneck pace for a few seconds before freeing itself.

Not long after that, the tide bottomed out and the bites stopped altogether. We hooked our lures onto our reels, rested our rods on our shoulders and started the long trek back to the truck at 12:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 6^th. Summer was over, but with the best fishing of the year ahead of us, that was fine by me.