Fluke Fishery Lights Up at Block; 502-Pound Mako Landed
“Zach Harvey is an idiot…”
Mother Nature, on Harvey’s recent doomsday prophecy about the state of our striper, fluke fisheries.
One of the things I have always loved about the Ocean State’s fishing community is how tightly it is bound together by forces of habit, tradition, and camaraderie—to say nothing of the “small world” phenomenon, the impossibility of crossing more than two degrees of separation between any two RI fishermen. We’re as close-knit as it gets. The places and the people that carry this community are rock-solid. They’re fixtures. Ranges, nav aids that orient our fishing lives in space and time.
One of those fixtures is now gone, and much of the fleet in South County has been locked in a thousand-yard stare mourning the loss. As you’ve more than likely heard by now, Ronnie Mouchon, the driving force behind Breachway Bait in Charlestown, RI, and a fixture in Rhode Island fishing, died suddenly last Sunday, July 5. Mouchon is many things to many people. Among many other things, he played a large role in the development of a ridiculous number of the state’s sharpest stripermen. Few living rod-and-reelers know the lay of the sand and stones between Point Judith and Quonny as Mouchon did. When the rest of the fleet was scratching its collective head, Mouchon was filling the well with livies no one else could find, and feeding them to huge bass no one else could find. I shudder to think how many South County rockpiles drained out of our collective knowledge with Ronnie’s passing.
Mouchon was a bona fide striper sharpie, a guy with a big heart, free with information if you passed muster with him, one helluva hand in the galley, and a ballbuster extraordinaire. Beyond your own mourning, say a prayer for the Mouchon family.
Thankfully, it’s clear enough how we should honor the man: Get out immediately and start taking advantage of the exponentially improved fisheries unfolding a bit behind their typical timeframe. There are stripers along the Newport oceanfront, stripers along the South County shoreline, and stripers across the pond at Block Island. Montauk has had a pretty good load of big fish for more than a week, and if you think back to around this time last season, it looks like we’re probably about to be on the receiving end of a pretty substantial slug of big bass at the Island. Fluking has improved by leaps and bounds over the last five days, most notably out on the East Grounds where no one’s been complaining about the average size of the slabs coming aboard. The tuna are still south and east (more east of late) of the Island, and shark fishing…Well, did you hear about the 502-pound mako caught by a couple of fluke fishermen over at Block early-week?
There’s no time like the present. Get out and get your fish. It’s a short season—and getting shorter by the second.
Mikey Wade at Watch Hill Outfitters had a scattering of good news this week, thanks to some solid developments on the local scene. Notably, some of the surf guys have found steady action on quality bass and a pretty good load of mixed-size bluefish. Christian from the shop has been picking away at keeper and some larger bass—averaging two to three fish per session—working the surf at Napatree Point, where, incidentally, he has also been taking full limits of fluke into the 20-inch class casting and catching on the inside (Watch Hill Harbor side). Scott Aragoni spent the week over at Block Island, slinging eels and working his top-secret Yo-Zuri Mag Darters for bass into the 30-pound class. The striper activity has cooled a bit on the Watch Hill Reefs of late, though that trend may reflect the sharp drop in talent out and about since the commercial fishery closed down last Sunday. On the Island side, boat guys have been casting plugs, soft plastics, and other early-morning and nighttime standards along the south side, anywhere from Black Rock to Southwest Point. These fish, often marked by surface activity, have generally ranged from larger schoolie size to around 32 or 33 inches, and they’ve been mixed with various ratios and sizes of bluefish. The Southwest Corner from the bell buoy off Southwest Point all the way out to the Peanut has been turning out some very large bass for the guys who’ve learned how to work the tides, drifting eels during the sometimes-brief periods when they can put baits in front of heavyweight linesides without too much interference from the blues or dogs that can make short work of a couple dozen snakes when the tides ease to a crawl. The schoolie bluefin action continues out past Block, more southeast than south of late, and there’s a second shot of larger schoolies and some 150-pounders out beyond the Dump into the Shipping Lanes north of Atlantis. Shop regular and bluewater enthusiast, Mike Welch, made a 130-mile round trip early-week to the latter area, and managed a pair of legal bluefins, one in the 40-inch range, and another around 54 inches (the more elusive larger slot fish in the 47 to less than 73-inch bracket). The sharking is quite good.
Matt Conti at Snug Harbor was generally pleased with the state of our rod-and-reel fishing options as this goes out the door. First item of business, noted Conti, has been the long-awaited arrival of a large body of substantial fluke, many in the 5- to 8-pound range, on and around Block Island’s East grounds (about 4 miles ESE of Old Harbor). Among those out capitalizing on these fish early-week was Capt. Tony Guarino of Booked Off Charters. He and his wife were picking through dogfish and sea bass to catch jumbo slabs when they noted the presence of a very large mako that was plucking fish off their lines, coming nearly to the surface in pursuit of one dogfish. Capt. Tony headed down below to scramble up some gear of the proper scale and came up with a stand-up outfit and steel leader, and shortly thereafter sunk the hook in the outsized toothy mystery meat; some time later, they wrestled a sizeable mako to the transom and managed to get a tailrope on it. Short-handed and unable/no eager to attempt boating this fish, they tied it off and set out on a long northward journey to the dock in Snug Harbor. According to Matt, the fish was still very much alive—not the twitchy, reflexive, mostly-dead alive, but the trying-to-swim alive—when they reached the scale at the end of the dock. Once all parties were confident it was safe to attempt hoisting the fish, they hung what turned out to be a whopping 502-pound mako—a male no less (males of these proportions are seldom seen on inside grounds in our part of the watery world).
Back on the fluke front, the Island has definitely seen the best numbers of jumbos, but folks fishing along the south shore beach—both sides of the Bay mouth—have been chipping away at a much-improved showing of keeper-sized fish; per the norm, you’ll wind up culling through loads of almost literally “wallet-sized” flatties to get your keepers. Black sea bass remain both abundant and large, though few of the fish advertised as 4- or 5-pound sea biscuits weigh much more than 3 pounds. Scup are plentiful on most hard pieces everywhere, with the main trick finding the right stack of silver to work on.
Cod fishing went from fair last week to very good the last several days. These fish, many of which have come off the Southwest or Southeast corners of Coxes Ledge, are mostly market-sized specimens under 10 pounds, but they’ve been surprisingly abundant. Clam bait, unfortunately, remains in fairly tight supply on even the coastwide basis.
The bass fishing continues to show improvement off the Island’s SW Corner and along the south side, with eels working better the last several days than they have all season; there are 30s, 40s, and 50s scattered up and down the high ground from the Boulders out to the Fence if you can time your drifting efforts to coincide with a solid running tide, but you may struggle with blues or dogs when the flow slows. Canyon reports—the last round came from Atlantis or Hydrographers—suggest there are some very nice yellowfins in the 50- to 70-pound range, along with occasional bigeyes and other exotics, on the daytime troll. One boat, the Aerie One, captained by none other than Buzz Smart, logged more than a dozen yellows that scaled as high as 50 pounds plugged, along with a pair of blue marlin, trolling and also chunking through the night, at Atlantis early-week. The school bluefins around Block remain reasonably open to trolled offerings, but the action seems to be creeping eastward more toward the Fingers over the last couple days.
In addition to the aforementioned 502 monster mako, a thresher of 369 and another mako of 317 have crossed the docks since last Friday, fuelling high hopes for the shop’s shark tournament that kicks off Saturday.
Samantha at Sam’s was pleased to relay the details of some much-improved local fishing when I checked in Thursday evening. The Newport surf contingent has been taking more and better bass from the local surf since the beginning of the week. Monday night, Sam among others watched a school of big blues drive a bigger school of pogies into the wash at Second Beach—an event that has played out elsewhere more than once in the days since. The Block Island striper situation is improving rapidly, and the doormat invasion of the East Grounds has drawn quite a bit of interest from local slab specialists. Speaking of fluke, waves of better fish have been filling in from Fort Adams all the way around to Sakonnet, with many of the areas folks had written off as deadsville a couple weeks ago now turning out a steady supply of keepers. It pays, in other words, to strike out on your own, regardless of the hype around the marina, and see for yourself where the better slabs are and are not. Black sea bass—and I realize this probably goes without saying—are big and they’re just about everywhere you might go looking for fluke. School bluefins are still around south and east of the Island, and there have been intermittent showings of some larger fish—100- and 200-pounders—popping up down in the Shipping Lanes south of the Dump for more than two weeks now.
