Although I’ve always counted May among my favorite stretches of fishable calendar, I understand all too well how infuriating month- five angling can in our corner of the world. It is, after all, the first turbulent leg of a fast-developing and unpredictable fishing year—a month of high contrasts, extremes on either end of the fish- catching spectrum. May is a dead ocean one day and the next seven, your will to fish with the necessary focus flagging with each fishless session. Then, just as you’re preparing to put the futile angling mania on indefinite hold, give it a week or two to solidify, all piscatorial hell breaks loose: in a single, sodden morning adrift over the same early-season bottom that just gave you an eight- day skunking, you absolutely tune big fluke, three over 8 pounds and another half-dozen between 4 and 6.
May is migration fishing after all. But unlike the more celebrated migration that draws such heavy participation from September onward, May represents the infant stages of a new fishing year. Where a so-called “fall run” develops out of summer’s relative fishing bounty, May’s fishery materializes out of a fishless winter void—often literally overnight.
It takes a measure of experience and the confidence it brings to keep slugging it out in the face of repeated skunking. The region’s sharpest fluke, striped bass, or cod fishermen know how to manage their own fifth-month expectations— treat May as the endurance run it generally turns out to be. Newbies, average anglers who must fish around other adult responsibilities—I’ve crossed paths with hundreds of them over nearly two decades—end up running out of patience over the course of back-to-back shutouts, or chasing stale intel or rumors all over hell’s watery half-acre.
If you’ve spent some years trying to put up some numbers to match the May headlines in all the magazines, the following are some thoughts, pieces of hard-won fishing strategy that friends and I have unearthed over years chasing just- arrived fluke or migrant stripers on the first half of May.
Attitude Adjustment
Corny as the idea has been rendered by incessant googan repetition, a big part of the early spring equation is the simple willingness to get out before you’ll have the luxury of verifying recent action in fishing reports: In spring—especially the years air and water temps stay brisk, and the fair-weather guys decide to hang back pending favorable reports from braver souls. There’s much to be said for the particular gratification of actually making the reports, rather than reading about other anglers’ maiden voyages of the new season. Especially in the first two weeks of May, you’ll be wise to anticipate multiple skunking before your first good shot of fish.
Narrow Search
Naturally, you’ll also want to choose your target areas carefully, identifying deeper channel areas that will funnel fluke into traditional spring grounds, and working the surrounding gravel to hard plots of high ground where inbound waves of fluke will stage before they spread out along the beach or continue moving up into bays or sounds. You’ll be wise to avoid Hail Mary runs to distant hotspots that require ideal wind and sea conditions, focusing instead on terrain you can scout quickly, making quick drifts then moving along.
Bait Concentrates Fish
More than working perfect, archetypal slab turf with surgical precision, the May fishery seldom strays far from the nearest cloud of bait—often squid, sand eels or herring—and you should gravitate toward fluke feed over structures that will hold big flatties as summer takes hold. Heat-Seeking
When inshore waters are still frigid, you should pay attention to any tidal or weather influence that might buoy average water temps—if only for a couple of hours. Working bottom outside shallow harbors, bays, or tidal rivers where mid- day sun can heat water through a flood tide cycle, then release this solar-warmed brine into cooler water out front as the tide ebbs may turn up a few fluke—even if there was no sign of the fish prior to the outflow mixing. Likewise, make it a point to get out on the heels to a warm spell, as even minor gains in water temp can stimulate a feed. More than a few times, I’ve returned to an area that shut me out on one tide after the next tide change, as the combination of warmer water or properly aligned drift conditions can mean the difference between barren bottom and a career-best catch of big, early-arriving jumbos.
Lose Your Preconceptions About Timing
If only to reinforce a spirit of quasi-scientific open-mindedness, you should—at least in the earliest stages of the May fishery—resist the urge to work out pet theories about a season running “ahead” or “behind” a generic schedule. Truth is, while there is average timing for gamefish arrivals, you’re foolish to bend your accumulated observation into service of this or that pet theory designed to attach causal relationships to fish migration of feeding patterns. By all mean record observations, but avoid trying to torture ornate predictions out of your raw “data.” Assume that fish are on time whenever they arrive, and fish carefully to avoid missing cues that might underwrite your first doormat catch of 2015.
Less Weight, More Reps
Rather than logging one 12-hour marathon session that saps your will to keep your spots and their fish honest tomorrow or a week from now. Go as often as you possibly can, running through your May spots fairly fast then running home to the barn. It’s no accident that our May fisheries favor the full-timers—pin-hookers or party/ charter captains who sample areas daily and will thus see evidence of fresh arrivals before anyone else does.
Southward Intercept
It probably goes without saying, but you’ll want to head for the south-facing oceanfront, even if that demands a few extra minutes steaming to the grounds: The idea is to intercept inbound life in places it will show days or weeks before they spread out across their traditional June or July habitat.