By Zach Harvey
T he conventional wisdom says that August marks a transition in inshore fishing from the relative ease of June-July patterns to a period of tough picking as sustained high heat raises water temps to a relative boil, and local fluke, striped bass and other staple species become skittish, lethargic. There’s some truth to all this, but I’ve always maintained that “August Doldrums” theory relates more to our tendency to project human qualities on aquatic neighbors than it does to piscatorial reality.
When you hear that water temps have hit 75 degrees at Second Beach or Southwest Ledge, always remember that such readings represent surface temperatures—that the water subsurface cools with depth. Remember, too, that all the young-of-the-year baitfish that have crowded the shallows since June have been growing steadily since, and that new waves of baitfish are arriving all the time. If there is one reliable overlap between humanity and inhabitants of the watery world, it’s that, in our part of the world, the migratory visitors we target are hard-wired opportunists—they (and we) must “make hay while the sun shines” or perish when it snows.
Fish feeding patterns change as waters warm. But the feeding continues. That is the key concept in Month Eight angling. If you plan to keep catching through the height of swamp-arse season, you must make a real effort to change your own fishing behaviors accordingly. Often that will mean fishing outside the comfort zone of normal-people biological rhythms—and outside your own normal-circumstances territorial range. The alternative—and it’s always a viable option, especially for those who cannot plan their professional exploits around fishing goals—is to expand your own angling horizons by targeting a species less affected by sweltering daytime temps.
Slump Strategy
Statistically, odds are quite good for trophy-striper nuts in the month of August. Over the last decade, a great many 50-plus-pound bass have crossed transoms during the so-called Dog Days of August. Many articles have been written about a shift in trophy-bass landings from the “Fall Runs” of yore toward the present-day peak of High Tourist Season. Partly, that shift may reflect how much better the fleet has gotten at catching summer stripers, but there are many other factors at work. Either way, don’t think for a minute that all the eighth month cows racked up over the last decade were caught during banker’s hours: The folks who catch August heavies with any consistency lose sleep in the process. When air temps approach triple-digits and the mid-day sun could singe your eyebrows, stripers slide off into the deep and sulk. But give those same fish the tail end of a flood tide in the wee hours at Block Island’s North Rip, and you’ll sometimes get a half-hour feed out of them. (Flood tides there will pull cooler water up over the high ground from the eastward depths, while surface temps often cool dramatically through the hours of darkness.) Sometimes, a few degrees in water temp are the difference between hunger strike and late-night pig-out.
Same rationale applies in the lower reaches of Narragansett Bay, with some additional variables at work. Generally, in the hottest weather, you can safely rule out afternoon or evening ebb tides that deliver super-heated, low-oxygen middle- to upper-Bay water to the lower reaches or the East or West Passages. Meanwhile, you can salvage heat-wave striper sessions by leaning on nighttime flood tides for many of the same reasons from the Island scenario above.
The fish may well head into a mini-torpor in the hottest weather, but remember that every migratory visitor has come to sunny and tropical Rhode Island for one main purpose, to eat herself portly while the sun shines and potential calories shoal up for the taking, then ride out the dark months on the reserves. The big girls will lay off the buffet for a tide or two, but they’ll eat—have to eat—sometime. When the thermometer reads “disgusting” for a week at a time, plan around “cool-off conditions” and you might stick a slob. If nothing else it becomes markedly easier to rule out the worst conditions in August.
While fluke tend to be at least somewhat less sensitive to water temperature, you won’t hurt your odds by planning for cooler water. In that fishery, you must consider other August variables like drift conditions and the degree of fishing pressure an area has experienced through the foregoing summer. Generic hot-weather fluke theory says that you should head to deeper water—an approach that tends to turn up the better numbers of quality fish in August and—if tropical depressions hold off—early September. The deep water (60 to 80 feet) off the Newport oceanfront, out in front of the Center Wall, and in recent seasons but not this season, outside the mouth of the Sakonnet River, are all perennial hotbeds of late-innings doormat activity. Often, Clay Head on the east side of Block Island or Black Rock on the south side will cough up fish in reliable concentrations.
Wisdom, Conventional and Otherwise
Just to throw a monkey wrench into the theoretical gears, I’ve always seen mid- to late-July as a kind of fork in the road for fluke specialists. It’s not pure coincidence that the bulk of shore-based fluking occurs from that point on. My own experiences point to some excellent shallow water slab-work during the same seasonal window that consolidates most of the doormat hunters in very deep water. I suspect you don’t hear much about shoal-water August doormats because folks sampling the inter-tidal zone with the same techniques that caught 8-pounders off Baileys Beach, Austin Hollow, or Green Hill back in June come up short in the rod-bending department. There are reasons this is so. Consider the kind of bait you see outside the first sandbar. It’s fish-bait—bay anchovies, spearing, sand eels, juvenile herring or hickory shad, some snapper blues. Guys dragging foot-long squid strips just outside the shore-break catch mostly sea weeds, spider crabs, or the occasional two-pound bluefish.
Clear, shallow water and bright mid-day put terminal tackle on display for sharp-eyed slabs, Forget the gleaming, XXL hooks, forget all the spinners and beads and knick knacks and three-way swivels, and lose the 50-pound fluoro even if it is “invisible.” (If it were invisible, would we need 10- or 20-pound test?) Instead, stick to mini, matte-finish barrel swivels, smallish, thin-wire hooks, and small egg sinkers or lighter bank sinkers hung at least two feed ahead of the unadorned hooks via dropper loops tied into your 15- to 30-pound fluorocarbon leaders. Where you’d usually hang carefully-cut squid and sea robin strip-baits, lip-hook two- to five-inch live baits you clogged the well with using sabiki rigs back at the marina. Since you seldom see snapper blues or hickory shad wearing disco-era headwear, lose all the arts-and-crafts-hour trinkets above the hook. You might be surprised, bucking the prevailing wisdom about August doormats, just how many fluke in the overall population seem to have navigated the entire last decade without reading a single printed word about the behavioral guidelines we’ve established for them.
Know Current
Deep or shallow, as is the rule in all fluking and much live-bait striper fishing, drift conditions—the interplay between wind, tide, and sea—will be a determining factor in success. If you lay out current charts like those in The Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book, which give you a big-picture look at the direction and velocity of tidal current at various flow stages, alongside tide tables and the short-range marine forecast, you can predict with some accuracy periods when wind direction and tide will align or vice versa (run against each other).
Armed with these clues about timing, you can not only zero in on the most likely windows of nice, quick, linear drifting, but rule out periods when wind-against-tide conditions will make it all but impossible to properly present a bait to slabs in even the best area. You might also factor in the periods during the month—the quarters of the moon—with the weakest tides overall. On the latter days, know that you’ll often get longer-than-usual slack water and weak flow through all but the peak flow of a given tide. With all of this data at your disposal—all but the marine forecast available well in advance—you can work the odds to ensure the times you choose to be on the water (away from the all-powerful air conditioner) will overlap with as many positive elements as possible. Bobbing around aimlessly on a windless, tideless ocean one day it has hit 90 just after sun-up is like watching old food-spatter bake off the inside of a convection oven. Put a couple such ill-conceived outings back-to-back, and you might put a serious hurt on your own will to keep fishing. This is why it’s equally important to eliminate likely duds—you at home not more than 12 inches from the A.C. at any given moment, feeling more than a little smug as you consider the other dingdongs at the marina who are out cauterizing any exposed skin with a nuclear-intensity sun overhead, catching nothing but a personal glimpse at global warming, circa 2178 AD.Diversify! There’s another whole set of considerations in August. Where June and July treat the striper or fluke specialists quite well, August can throw one-species fishermen into a gut-wrenching period of diminishing returns and a near-collapse in resolve to keep going. The good news is that the folks willing to look at other fisheries will find a whole host of real, live opportunities during the waning weeks of summer vacation.
The scup and sea bass that have been somewhat scattered suddenly start to pile up on the harder real estate around Narragansett Bay, across the pond at the Island, and along both sides of the south shore beach. As mini-bait like bay anchovies form dense clouds, and offshore bait like half-beaks and sand eels move well inshore, the fits and starts of green bonito activity generally begin to coalesce into something you might mistake for a “bite.” South of Block Island, little pieces of deteriorating Gulf Stream eddies usually move into more civilized range, delivering various exotic species—mahimahi, white and blue marlin, tuna of all sorts (but mostly bluefin), wahoo, and some of the less common shark species like tigers or hammerheads to semi-local areas. Bluefish will pile up in some areas in numbers that would hurt your head if you were trying to sneak live eels past them to striped bass, but if you actually target them, you can put together some action-packed sessions your children of grandkids will never forget. Some folks will even scratch together respectable showings of keeper codfish out on Coxes Ledge when the August afterburn has chased the roving pestilence of dogfish off the high spots. There’s just not enough space here to run through the fine detail of each viable fishery, but your local tackle shop can certainly fill you in on the particulars. The key concept is that the multi-species fisherman with a willingness to venture into new geographic or tactical territory can eke out an entire month of peak fishing while the striper savants have begun to think hard about the merits of mini-golf or waterskiing. The notion of a summer slump most readily applies to those who are confined to the shoreline.
But even there, a willingness to make a nocturnal shift and a sharp eye for August-friendly casting perches—where larger fish have ready access, via channel waters, to the deep end of the pool—can put you back in the running. So will spending some time identifying areas with significant tidal exchange, areas with rockpiles and vegetation out front, rather than softer bottom that will soak up and hold solar heat. Again, August pays dividends to those who combine a healthy work ethic with heads-up strategy. Most of the heat-wave angling wisdom involves mining forecasts and tide charts for brief pauses in the worst of the oppressive heat, and studying grounds and the current influences that affect them; on the human side of the equation, the 90-plus air and humidity readings that can make it tricky to locate the boundary between sea and air (the moisture content similar on either side of the surface) also makes it a serious chore to drag your own parboiled carcass away from the air conditioner. It’s about minimizing needless exposure to the crippling heat during periods of predictably slow fishing. It’s one thing to risk heat stroke when the fish are chewing, and quite another to do it when there’s nary a feeding fish within two miles.
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