As of press time here in central June, no one quite knows how to feel about the imminent arrival of month seven—or what to expect in terms of angling opportunities. If the patterns hold, it will be early July that reveals the actual state of the striper fishery over at Block Island, and confirms whether our fluke are indeed just running late, or whether there’s something unsettling in the works for that load- bearing summer sinker-bouncing option. Regardless of the prognosis inside, you can count on some solid developments on the near-offshore grounds as sharks fill in on the usual 30-fathom wrecks, ledges, and high spots, and the first school bluefins, bonito, mahimahi, and other exotics come inside to cash in on the bait bonanza a quick shot south and east of Block Island—all of it within reach of a seaworthy 23- or 25-foot center console if you pick your day carefully.
More to the point, after the gut-wrenching tedium and uncertainty of June’s touch- and-go fishing, a run outside for a change of scenery and a real shot at a fish that outweighs you might be just the thing to ring in the second phase of the 2015 season.
Contrary to our curmudgeonly fishing habits here in New England, if you can keep an open mind about what constitutes “offshore” gear, you’ll be surprised at the array of lightweight, compact, user-friendly gear that delivers big power without the inefficiency of old-school big-game rods and reels. What I mean is that these days you don’t need a half-dozen Penn International 50 Wides for a run down to the Gully, Coxes Ledge, Tuna Ridge, the Suffolk, or the Acid Barge. In fact, a couple of ballsy “15” class Daiwa or Avet conventionals loaded with mega yardage of 60- or 80-pound braid and topshot, and matched up to a next-generation 6- to 6 1⁄2-foot “jigging” stick, will handle every target in a 10-species trip with power to spare.
Naturally, you’ll want at least a couple of traditional stand-up outfits to handle the big jobs—the outermost balloon in your shark-drifting line-up, the one with a live 7-pound bluefish beneath, the deep fillet bait that will start you off at a 150-yard line deficit on the spool of your Penn 50, a splash bar cruising a ways back in the wash, or bird/Green Machine combo way back on the tuna troll. For everything else, the lighter gear adds to the challenge and also the enjoyment of targeting small and mid- size pelagic.
The key concept here is that you don’t have to squander your life savings (such as it is after five years in the recent economy) to run outside. For your sharking, you’ll want two buckets of ground bunker chum, one to hang outboard, the other to slow- thaw with all your other slick additives in a small barrel, from which you’ll ladle the brew at a steady rate. You don’t need to go insane making your own leaders—just load up on store-bought single-strand wire rigs, plus 4- to 16-ounce sinkers, rubber bands, balloons, a couple skirts some mackerel or bunker for hook baits. You should plan to hit the North Rip or East Grounds at Block to drag umbrella rigs on wire or diamond-jig to grab 6 to 10 blues (and keep as many as you can alive in case you get the chance to show one to a 400-pound mako.
In the charterboat world, the standard sharking game plan, after rounding up live blues, is to steam some miles toward your intended starting point for a shark drift, then, when you run into some half-decent looking water, usually in the low to mid- 60s, you dump in the tuna spread and look around for the right water at trolling speed—5 to 7 knots. Inside, where forage is dominated by sand eels, squid, and mainly smaller fishbaits like herring or spike mackerel, small single lures—hex heads, small jets, Clones, cut-back Green Machines behind birds, little Zuker brushes, or cedar plugs, etc.—will prove the best options on whatever pelagic life you might encounter. In a small skiff without outriggers, you might run four or five rods, bigger set-ups for the baits farther back, and your lighter set-ups for little stuff run outside your immediate prop wash off a rod held outboard in the manner of a mini, hand-held ‘rigger.
Anywhere you see birds, bait, floating debris, slicks, whale or other mammal activity, is worth a couple of passes.
Anywhere you get a bite or hook-up, you should drill the exact numbers and surrounding area in case fish that charged the spread and missed are still topside in that zone, ready to attack. If you’re serious about catching a school tuna, plan to get as early a start as you can stand to to get your tuna trolling in as early in the morning as possible—the window between dawn and 8 a.m. usually your best odds of the day.
Depending on your success trolling, or sharking thereafter, you might consider making a couple drops on some high ground at Coxes, or in the vicinity of Sharks Ledge/ the Fairway Buoy for a shot at the first part of the high-summer cod bite.
That action typically relates to the dogfish populations in the hard-bottom areas that generally harbor codfish. If your clam baits get swarmed by spiny gray ones before you can engage the reel, you might as well save yourself the aggravation, steam into the Island, make a couple passes at SE Light or SW Ledge to see if you can scratch a bass or two. If you put some time into lining up your tides, you might put together one of the best multi-species inshore-offshore days of career, like one I made some years back:
By one long day’s end, we had tuna steaks, mako, codfish, hake, sea bass, scup, fluke and one small piece from a lone striper someone caught on a bucktail meant for fluke—not a bad haul for 12 hours and right around 60 round-trip miles.
In fairness, given the glacial rate at which things have materialized on other fronts thus far in 2015, it’s probably safe to assume that it will be somewhere in the second or third week of July before the pelagic activity really shapes up. That said, there’s only one way to know that for sure, and you’re probably just the right guy to see what’s cooking outside.
