Stripers, Pogies in Pawcatuck River
I’ve been writing Rhode Island fishing reports for quite a while, ’07 or ’08 to the present—year-round up until these last couple seasons. Before then, I was editing and compiling reports, including RI, so really I’ve been pretty close to the weekly-report process since June, 2002, when I took my first gig in the fish-writing racket. I am not graybearding, here, just trying to lay out some context when I say this has been one of the toughest May-June ramp-ups I can remember, and after calling around the horn late Thursday afternoon and evening, I definitely not alone in thinking that.
Fact is, here in central June, there’s usually something bursting into high gear by now—even if it’s not a huge, hyper-local event. But, barring a couple of short-lived flare-ups, it’s been a whole lot of poking around for not too many fish of any kind. Fluking’s been scattered and isolated—a little quarter-square-mile plot of bottom off the west side of Block Island, across at Sakonnet, maybe a little bit of action around the mouth of Narragansett Bay in the little lanes of high-power bottom that occasionally turn out a slammer tide of drifting at about this point.
On the striper side, it’s been much the same, with more reliable action in the tidal rivers to our near- and far-west, and slim pickings over at Block Island thus far. There does seem to be a better shot of fish scattered about in the upper reaches of the Bay, amid 10 million pogies—a “buyer’s market” for what stripers are hanging with those bait schools.
The squid have made a few false starts on the cobble bottom along the South County beachfront, as well as across the way in Newport harbor. Rumor has it the Frances Fleet had a solid night of calamari catching on Wednesday night, and also that a couple of the dayboat draggers who know the hang-rich tows between Nebraska Shoal and Watch Hill have been carrying some good trips to market. On the balance, though, the squidding’s kept most of the diehard tubemen in a state of suspended animation, the fishery having felt like it’s about to materialize for a month now.
Hell, every fishery feels about like that at the moment. Our fishing ecosystem seems to be lagging behind normal rhythms. The game changes, year to year. The trick is that you need to get up and go, then keep going—especially in the years like this one, when it can be tempting to sit back on your haunches, the boat chafing on the pilings, and wait for someone else to go find the fish. It’s mid-June already, and high time we all got our arses in gear.
Watch Hill Outfitters said the bass fishing has been slow but steady in the Pawcatuck River, with decent numbers of fish on the prowl from Little Narragansett Bay all the way up to the Cemetery and beyond, adult bunker seemingly the catalyst for some of the action on better fish. There are schoolies, but also decent numbers of cookie-cutter fish in the 30- to 32-inch bracket, taking popping plugs, sea worms drifted, pogies (chunked or whole), and various other topwaters. Mike Wade said he’d fished Thursday morning along the south side of Fishers Island, landing a slow pick of bass and a few bass, including at least one keeper. Isabella Beach had a few fish, but no wild stacks of them. Word is that the Race finally lit up Wednesday night, then sucked on Thursday—perhaps thanks to the shot of armpitesque air that drifted in like atmospheric flatulence overnight Wednesday. In a typical year—if it could be said there’s any such thing—the Race seems to switch on sometime around the second or third week of May, generally with the arrival of squid and little guitar-pick-sized butterfish. Wade said they registered 64-degree water up in the Pawcatuck, then 54-degree water on a daytime ebb tide around Fishers: Pretty brisk, all things considered. The fluking’s been a picky affair along Misquamicut, numbers of small fish but no big bodies of joes anywhere specific. You go make your prospecting drifts anywhere from 35 out to 70 feet, and pick one here, one there. The shop weighed a 7-pound-plus fish early-week, and there are others out there for the taking: Just don’t expect rod-bending miracles, because your take of slabs will relate closely to the amount of focus you give the job. This would be a good time to strip up any/all sea robins that come up, given large slabs’ affinity for that food source this time of year.
Snug Harbor called it a ponderous week around the docks—lotsa wind, weed, and, over at the Island, dogfish. The fluking has been a borderline ordeal even for the sharpest guys, who’ve been trucking as far as Sakonnet in search of something a bit more sturdy in the catching department than the west side of Block. If the wind can stay down for a few minutes, fluking should start to get in gear in the very near future. The striper fishing has been causing some gray hairs for the rod-and-reelers over at the Island, who are finding bass scattershot across the usual real estate around the North Rip, Southwest, and the high spots between Old Harbor Point and the foot of Southeast Light. The trouble to date is that there are no reliable concentrations in any one spot; what fish guys are finding aren’t chewing for any length of time in any one spot. One of my other sources did point out that the striper activity over at Block didn’t really gewt rolling until the tail end of June or even July, so there’s plenty of time for things to come together. There are tournaments coming up on most fronts within the next couple of weeks, and the commercial bass season is open, so there is at least a fleet out looking around, keeping some of the spots honest: There will be more, and hopefully better, news next week.
Sam Toland at Sam’s was not exactly a radiant beam of angling optimism when I called late Thursday. One of his fluke regulars, a guy who knows his business, had a career-worst day this week, rounding up a meager showing of two—count ‘em, two—smallish slabs one day this week. And from what Toland has gathered, no one else really seems to be putting a serious dent in the local summer flounder biomass, either. There were a few fish on a tight plot of bottom at Sakonnet a week ago, but then a whole state-wide flotilla started working there. Bass fishing has been heavy on pogies—Sam ran into a spotter pilot, who confirmed there are an awful lot of menhaden stuffed in the upper Bay at this point—and conspicuously light on the big-bass production of late. Toland noted the sea bass are marvelously thick just about everywhere, and you’re allowed exactly one of them—another magical moment in contemporary fisheries management.
This season has had a strange feel to it, beyond cold water and spotty fishing. Given the dicey weather patterns and the general lay of bait and fish at this stage of the game, it almost feels like we’re biologically in about the third week of May. Here’s hoping that’s the case, that fishing breaks wide-open the way it always seems to in the seasons that start with prolonged fleet-wide nail-biting.
