Big Fish in the Bay

Big Fish in the Bay

By: Capt. Hap Farrell

Each day that goes by seems to bring more and more stripers into Cape cod Bay. Some of our boats, from Rock Harbor, have seen schools of small and just legal bass moving from the deep water off the north edge of Billingsgate Shoals, over the shoals and into the area west of the old Target Ship.

There is plenty of bait for these fish. The whole area is full of large schools of sand eels. Up towards the # 3 can by Stony Bar and up towards Welfleet Harbor is loaded with mackeral right now. When the bass find them we will have a blitz on our hands.

The lure of choice in this area is the umbrella rig on 150 feet of wire trolled at around 3.5 to 4 knots. If you see the fish on the bottom using a fish finder let a little more line out. There are a lot of undersize bass but there are many fish up to 40 inches mixed in. I don't see this changing for at least another week or so. Some of these fish will move on in their migration but many will stay.

Lisa Buziewicz, from DC, will attest to this. She came along with the Jerry Kottman party aboard the Stunmai II, out of Rock Harbor, and showed everyone up by landing the biggest fish of the bunch. A 38 inch striped bass. Not bad for an up and coming engineer who had never fished before.