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Emily with a beauty of a bass. It’s been a great summer on the water so far, and I have my fingers crossed it will continue!
Earlier this week I had a great crew aboard the Miss Loretta.
This was a charity trip so I was hoping to get Kevin, Emily and Chris on top of some nice striped bass. Kevin had won a charity auction fishing trip with me this past winter at a fundraising event for the Bina Farm. Thanks again Kevin for donating to a really good cause.
The Bina Farm is an impressive organization that helps children and adults with developmental disabilities. They help these people in a variety of ways, but the coolest and most central component to the program is what they refer to as “therapeutic riding.” In other words, they use horses and horse back riding to help people learn life skills, gain confidence and ultimately enrich their overall life experience.
Pretty impressive to say the least. I’ve been fortunate to attend a few Bina Farm events over the past couple of years and I’ve always been excited and impressed by what they are doing. The kids faces always light up with delight when they are plopped on top of a 1,000 pound horse!
Fishing Report for Cape Cod – Week of August 23
We headed out a little before sunset and were greeted by impeccable on the water conditions. It was flat calm, sunny and there was a slight crisp to the air. I could tell that late August was approaching, it just had that late summer feel out there the other night.
I’m not sure if it was the slight chill or if we just got lucky, but we stumbled upon a nice batch of fish no more than 15 minutes after leaving the marina. Good start!
Of course we lost track of the fish right off the bat, however with a little more searching and sonar work we were able to zone back in on a productive stretch of water with enough life in it to warrant some fishing time.
The crew chucked the baits into the water and after a few minutes of drifting around we had our first take. From the sound of the drag I could tell this was a decent fish. Nice!
It was so calm that I could see a bunch of bass in the 20-30 pound range chasing the hooked fish to the boat. After a nice battle Kevin had the first bass of the day in the boat.
Kevin hooked up with a real drag screamer.
The fish was aggressive to say the least and had completely swallowed the eel. Before I knew it we had another drag making noise and Emily was hooked up!
Emily did a nice job bringing this fish in and before we knew it we had two beautiful bass on the deck.
At this point I was venturing into some seriously skinny water and marking the occasional bass here and there right along the bottom. There were a lot of weeds and bottom vegetation in the area which made marking the bass a little challenging.
Often times growing up I would be unsure as to what were bass marks and what was just a weed bed along the bottom. Occasionally the weeds are so thick that they register as orange and red on the sonar, which can make distinguishing bass from weeds a little bit of a challenge.
I remember spending one afternoon a few years back absolutely hammering the same area for hours. Finally after 5 hours of nothing I realized that these were not fish on the sonar, but instead just a massive weed bed.
Eh well I guess that’s how you learn.
Flash forward to today and I like to think that I have this dilemma at least somewhat figured out. If you are over weed beds and you look real close at your sonar you’ll notice that the weed beds connect to the bottom. Any orange bass marks amongst the weed beds will have small space between the mark and the bottom.
Same goes for running over a weed bed versus a school of bass at a higher rate of speed. The mark might look similar, however the weed bed mark will extend right to the bottom, while the school of bass will have a small space between the mark and the bottom. Makes perfectly good sense if you stop and think about it, however it’s a small detail that is easy to overlook. Well at least it was easy for me to overlook until recently.
I think this September and October has the potential to produce quite a few bass like this one.
The crew and I spent the rest of this trip hooking up and reeling in bass up to 30 pounds. No monsters but consistent action with some beautiful striped bass. Around 10pm we called it quits and headed back to the dock after catching around a dozen keepers between 10 and 30 pounds.
We enjoyed a gorgeous flat calm ride back to the dock with shooting stars and crystal clear skies. Can’t beat that for a late August striped bass fishing trip.
Click Below for the Extended Cape Cod Fishing Report
I still have a few September dates available, but they are filling up quickly. If you’d like to get out fishing this September or October I would recommend getting a crew together and emailing me at ryan@myfishingcapecod.com as soon as you can. Thanks!
Click here for more information on this trip.
There’s also been some awesome surf casting happening this past week. Surprisingly there’s been some decent top water action on some big bass from shore.
Click here for more information about the recent solid surf casting bite.
I’ll be out again tomorrow so lets hope the bass stick around!
Tight lines and take care,
Ryan