261 Bigeye Wins Castafari Crew the Tri-State Canyon Shootout
“…Bass fishing at the Island? It’s been goo…oka…about the same, I guess…I mean, there are good times when people catch good fish and there are bad times…”
-Snug Harbor Marina’s Matt Conti on the state of a Block Island striped bass fishery drawing decidedly mixed reviews
Watch Hill Outfitters said the tube-and-worming along the south side of Block was fruitful on Wednesday, surrendering blues into the low teens and bass to 44 inches. Scuppiong’s been good to lights-out on the humps, bumps, and hard spots from Naps and Watch Hill Light up the line eastward to Weekapaug and Quonnie.
Capt. Chris Willi at Block Island Fishworks has been pleased by the arrival of some bass in the schoolie to low-30-inch range—ideal targets for the lighter-tackle cast-and-catch approach the skipper prefers. These fish have been scattered along the east side, Clay Head, Mansion Beach to Scotch, off Old Harbor Point, where both skiff fishermen slinging artificials in, and the guys prowling the wash on foot, casting outward. The south side, too–the length of it showing fish at one time or another—has had the same bracketed sizes of fish with some heavies in the mix as well after dark. The most consistent stretch has been Black Rock to around Southwest. One caveat: There has been a massive drifting nightmare of brown weed carpeting the bottom from roughly the middle of the south side wrapping around Southwest Point and continuing as far north as Dories Cove on the wst side as of press time. Willi noted the Tri-State Canyon Shootout earlier in the week overlapped with some hellacious wind and snotty seas that kept most of the small boats out of the running. Winning fish, a bigeye taken, rumor has it, somewhere between the Fish Tails and West Atlantis. That eyeball—one of the only big specimens of that species that came in to the weigh station—scaled an impressive 261 pounds. It was taken on the troll by a seasoned crew of the Cape Cod-homeported Castafari, led by Capt. Damon Sacco.
The coveted fluke calcutta was taken by a 10-pound fluke.
Meanwhile, there are larger bass still on the prowl along the high ground from the Boulders out to the Fence, a fish here, a fish there, with the heavies feeding during maddeningly short, precise windows in mostly the night tides. The daytime eeling is anything but a sure thing. Fluking is still good off the south side (south of SE Light most notably) from approximately 70 feet out past 100 feet—dogfish obviously a consideration in the deeper areas, especially during periods of easterly winds. No real word on green bonito just yet. Big blues are all over.
Matt Conti at Snug Harbor reported a pretty nice shot of generally smaller bass with the occasional better one starting to pile up around the North End of the Island, providing a nice alternative to the fiberglass circus of monster-hunters dragging enough eels across the seabed there on any given weekend that if the eels could organize and rally around the right leader, they’d stand a decent chance of staging a riot and running the stripers clear off the fishing grounds. That area continues to turn out fish into the 40-pound class, but there’s a definite talent factor in catching the heavier fish of late.
There are still massive balls of tinker mackerel meandering around outside Point Judith and south of Jamestown, and Matt had confirmed word the floating fish trap off Black Point had a pretty good hit of green bonito this week—good signs for the possibility of the tunoid fishery taking shape out front in the not-so-distant future. The fluking along the South Shore has suffered from the odious brown weed matted up so thick along the ground floor that it’s been totally unfishable in quite a few places normally worth some better slabs at this point in the season. The good news for flukemen has been continued action on a large body of bigger slabs in the deeper water south of Block Island as deep as 100 feet. Remember, with easterly winds in the forecast, dogfish can become a problem in the deepest areas around the Island. Clay Head, per the norm for this time of year, has been surrendering some keeper fluke and the occasional doormat—a nice option when the westerly winds come up and the south side turns into a @#$%show.
Codfish are still cooperating on the SE and SW Corners of Coxes Ledge, with a surprisingly cooperative population of market-size keepers taking clams that the shop once again has in stock. In a pinch, you can take fish on smaller diamond jigs that might also stick you a memorable black sea bass. Scup are big and plentiful most everywhere. The tautog fishery that opened last weekend has drawn some attention to the rockpiles and reefs north of Nebraska Shoal, off the Walls, around Point Judith Light, Scarborough, Beavertail, and elsewhere. There have been limits taken in all kinds of places, but Matt has yet to see anything huge in the whitechin department.
Kenny Landry at Ray’s Bait up in Apponaug Cove, Warwick, had one of the shop’s longtime regulars, Eddie Cogean of Johnston, RI, come in early-week with an impressive 30-plus-inch, 12-pound doormat fluke he caught while power-drifting along the deepest part of the shipping channel directly beneath the Jamestown Bridge. The angler was disappointed that his entry failed to beat out a 12-4 that is the mark to beat in a long-running, ferocious competition with one of his fishing buddies. Cogean noted he caught the massive slab after a long session that started with all shorts, transitioned to keepers, and continued growing over the course of a tide until the big one flopped out of the net onto the deck. Cogean declined to relay the particulars of the rig or bait that slayed the Mighty Bridge Troll of a fluke; I have it on good authority from another source that the rig was a standard drift rig. The bait was developed a team of Norwegian and German genetic researchers in a top-secret laboratory 2 miles below the shop in the bedrock, accessible only via an old mineshaft in an elevator under 24-hour armed guard.
In other news, the folks who’ve been steaming south to look for better bass around the Newport reefs—Brenton and Sea Ledge, among others—have returned with some corker bluefish but precious little in the way of linesides. Eelers working the same general stretch have been covered up in giant black sea bass—usually inspiring a quick change of plans and some sea bass/fluke drifting on the deeper water. There are some skipjacks and the occasional 7-pound bluefish zipping and thrashing around Apponaug Cove, and the scup are thick at Spindle Rock and around Hope Island, among other hard pieces around the middle and upper Bay.
Sam Toland of Sam’s in Middletown said the fluke fishing is much improved out in the 60- to 80-plus-foot lanes of driftable bottom anywhere from the East Passage to Sachuest, with a better ratio of keepers and an occasional double-digit slab. Sam and Sam and others, found a very narrow window the sneak out of the shop, and took a quick shot down to Browns Ledge and turned up a respectable showing of big sea bass, groundskeeper codfish, and at least one tautog. A few young and highly motivated surfmen who have hung around the shop long enough to pick up some hard-won strategic morsels on what could well be called the lost art of chunking the stones along Cliff Walk and the Drive, where a couple of Toland’s protégés have stuck fish north of the 40-pound mark over the last week. While he might shun me for writing this, Sam is part of a dying breed in the world of RI bait and tackles, a guy who has a good eye for the young and fish-afflicted, a formidable variety and depth of fishing knowledge in just about every fishery Rhody anglers attempt, and a true gift for passing this knowledge along to the right people in up-and-coming fishing generations. His shop, part of a tradition that is passing out of this state’s culture—not least because Toland works hours that would put most 18-year-olds in their graves. It’s a place you should frequent and support—a great shop powered by legit people who legitimately know their shit.
