Bait, Bass, Blues, Fluke, Tautog on Verge of Big Improvement
It has been, by most (if not all) accounts, a late-breaking season in several ways—most notably, to date, in terms of focused fishing effort. Nearly two months ago, as we were all crawling out into the blinding daylight, looking on in wonderment at the strange yellow-white orb in the daytime cosmos, intrigued but also suspicious, we started to put it all together in our winter-pummeled skulls: Holy @#$%ing @#$%! Is this the day our great-great-grandparents used to tell us tales about before the Great Ice came and we spent 127 years underground?! Could this be the—What did they say they used to call it—Spr… Spre… Spring?!
I know: It was one seriously evil winter, and as of a few weeks ago, around the time the first schoolies started to stir at the West Wall, Carpenters, and down the Pawcatuck, I was following a trend I’ve tracked for some years now—a pretty reliable correlation, that is, between the severity of New England winter and the feverish, manic joy that sets in when we’re finally starting to lose the collective facial tic we’ve developed under the omnipresent threat of another three-day, 24-inch frontal ice age.
Frankly, given the sheer tonnage of snow we shoveled on my street, and given that some of the potholes frost-heaves and some highly specialized, somewhat unorthodox plowing tactics had conspired to install were deep enough to be called “foxholes,” I was sure the launch ramps, the marinas, and every casting perch from the Seekonk River to Sakonnet, and Conimicut to Cemetery Cove, would be crawling with newly-liberated fishnuts. I must admit that I’ve been surprised by how few folks, all things considered, have gotten into the game to date.
Still, there have been numbers of folks out and about, browsing the peg boards in the tackle shops, and quite a few of the boat-fishing contingent have already made preliminary shakedown runs. There have been guys (gals) out poking spring schoolies and also a reasonably slow-and-steady pick of keeper bass in most of the traditional April-May haunts all around the state. The usual suspects with the incentive, in the form of our state’s illustrious Multispecies Commercial Finfish License, to start the fluke hunt earlier than most of the rest of us—thanks to the ability, per that license, to retain smaller commercial keepers, 14 inches and up, that comprise the lion’s share of the very-early slab stock. The rod-and-reel guys along the south-facing beach—both sides of the Bay—seem to have lost most interest they once had in the spring tautog fishery; but rumor has it the tog are stirring in their usual shoal-water pre-spawning patterns up inside Narragansett Bay, where there’s still considerable interest in our state’s spring tautog season.
There were some folks taking longer prospecting runs as far down as 30 fathoms on the nicer days trying to scratch out a handful of keeper codfish, but Snug Harbor, one of our few remaining private-boat cod-wishing hubs, noted even their most persistent and unflappable groundfish gurus have tired of trying to scratch and scrape a few sorry cellar-dwelling bacalao out of a healthy dogfish biomass and the occasional rust-flanked wreck-troll choggie of near-tog proportions.
The spring squid fishery looked like it was coming together for a couple weeks there, with some decent shots of massive tubes in most night-lit spots along the south shore. But the, within the last week or so, what calamari had been around pulled one of that species’ textbook disappearing acts, and no one I’ve consulted since the middle of last week has seen hide nor hair of one since. There have, however been reports that the rod/reel guys up in Mass—notably on the Cape side of Nantucket Sound (and other places)—have been absolutely tuning the tubes for a couple of weeks.
If you’ve been hoping to pull a good supply of spring tubes, know that this whole fishery is notoriously hot-and-cold, going from wild, bushel-an-hour insanity to mind-numbing boredom overnight; point is, there’s plenty of time for the squid fishery to take shape, so don’t even think about stowing those squid jigs for at least a few weeks yet.
Word has it the upper reaches of Narragansett Bay have all kinds of pogies, but not a whole helluvalotta predators—bass or bluefish—arouond just yet to keep all that bait honest. Speaking of pogies/bunker, Mike Wade at Watch Hill Outfitters said the Pawcatuck River has been loaded with this prime spring feed fish for nearly a month as this goes out the door. And thankfully, there has been some life in the form of striped bass—schoolie size to the mid-30-inch range up and down the river at various times, and some decent scores of them, mainly for guys tossing Rattle Poppers, bucktail jigs dressed with various soft plastic, and of course, drifting the much-maligned but lethal large sea worm with minimal hardware or, if you’re feeling frisky, one of the old seaworm spinner rigs I’ve watched the old timers use to absolutely shellack young-buck surf guys at Cemetery Cove/the Brink on the might Rio Pawcatuck.
Best fluke anyone at Snug Harbor Marina had seen as of press time was a 6-and-change pounder stuck—most likely off the Island’s west side—by the inimitable Gisele Golembeski, a slab sharpie of growing renown who can, it is said, speak to fluke in five different languages. Water is still seriously brisk at this stage of things, but there have been some mostly smaller slabs anywhere from 25 to 60-plus feet of water along the Misquamicut beachfront. In general, the best numbers over the last week have been coming from the west side of Block Island, call it the mouth of New Harbor down toward SW Point.
Young Blaize Hatfield, Block Island native, out fishing with Hank Hewitt of Fishworks, launched what promises to be a bright fishing career with a double-bubble—two stripers on a single rig, one on the teaser, one on the plug—from an undisclosed Island beach a week ago. One of the fish was a sublegal, the other a keeper—the latter one of not too many legal-sized bass taken from the Island surf so far.
