By: Dan Carns
As I write this article my fishing buddies from Vermont and I are in the middle of planning our annual trip to Cape Cod, MA. This fishing trip began long ago with my friend Leon around 2002 and has seen a number of additions to the roster of friends that love to go. Although we all had simple sit inside kayaks that we converted to fishing crafts, we are all now kayak owners with full fishing setups and peddle drive systems that allow us to access places that were too hard to reach before.
Even though we have been going on this trip to the “Cape” for well over twenty years, there is still a lot of planning to consider. Jim brings a camper (aka fish camp) and we stay at Atlantic Oaks Campground in Eastham, so we are centrally located on the “Outer Cape” between Provincetown and Chatham. This location puts us less than a twenty to thirty-minute drive to the most outstanding fisheries in Massachusetts. Five minutes from camp is one of the greatest salt marshes on the outer Cape called Nauset Marsh. This marsh is five miles across and can take all day to cover but has an enormous stripped bass population that arrives in June. The real beauty of this marsh is how protected it is from the elements but has a huge tidal flow from the Atlantic Ocean and delivers tremendous amounts of bait that attract our favorite quarry, stripped bass and blue fish. These fish flood in on the rising tide and can be caught in very shallow water.
Our favorite place to fish is an entirely different environment and requires real planning. Herring Cove, literally the last and farthest place you can drive east in America, is in the Cape Cod National Seashore. For years we were confined by the enormous tides the “Race’ produced as we we’re still in paddle kayaks. Now that we have all graduated to peddle drive kayaks, we can easily reach the “edge” where the bottom drops from 45’ to 150’ in less than three peddle strokes. This transition can be magical when the tide changes and the bait is flowing around the Race. The real trick here is that the wind must be flat or at least from the N.E. and a changing tide to turn the bite on.
This year we arrived and launched into Nauset Marsh for the afternoon but were surprised to find no fish. The following morning the forecast was for flat calm water and an incoming tide around daybreak. We launched at Herring Cove into an amazing scene of busting fish and working birds. We spent that morning working over busting fish when our friend Pat realized that there were much bigger fish down low and would take our Savage Gear paddle tails if you worked them super slow. We boated slot and over slot Stripers in what we can only described as a trip of a lifetime!