Exploring Off-Cape: Boston Harbor Flounder Fishing

I always like to take the day off from work each year during the 2^nd week of May to go fishing on my birthday. Call it a present and a little psychological breather I like to give myself each spring.

This day in May often turns out to be one of the nicest weather days of the year, and often the trip ends up happening around Mother's Day. Of course the fishing part always had to be juggled around our national day of mother worshipping, especially when I became a married-with-children working guy.

But all in all, I was usually able to work things out one way or another. Once the kids became grown adults (and my own mom retired to Florida), Mother’s Day freed itself up along with all the rest of the days on the calendar.

I’ve never been one to filch out on my holiday gift-giving obligations, so a good deal of freedom and good will has been earned over the years.

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A few years ago, myself and a few of my friends and colleagues in the outdoor writing field planned an early season flounder fishing trip on Boston Harbor with Capt. Jason Colby of Little Sister Charters.

The opportunity says a lot about how far the city’s harbor cleanup/recovery has come since my childhood days during the 1970s, when the waters within the harbor more closely resembled the contents of a sewage tank.

In what has become an annual event, the trip affords Capt. Colby an early-season fishing break in advance of his always busy summer charter schedule. Jason is free to do a little fishing himself – which he is as passionate about as anyone I’ve ever known. 

We also tend to have a lot of fun together, and of course it coincides nicely with my birthday fishing tradition. Since Mother’s Day is customarily a day when not many charters are booked, I started calling it our annual “Balls of Steel Flounder Trip.”

“After all,” I reasoned, “you’ve got to have rock-hard cahones’ to go fishing on Mother’s Day!”

At least that's what we like to tell ourselves. But make no mistake; a lot of good-natured busting of said cahones’ ensues on every trip.

Capt. Jason Colby, Ron Powers (contributing writer, On the Water Magazine), and I are annual participants, while the 4^th member rotates among a select group of willing parties, (ideally those free of Mother’s Day obligations).

This year the position was filled by Andy Nabreski, design manager for On the Water Magazine. Andy’s personality, adept fishing ability, and sharp wit fit right in with the rest of the crew.

Due to the long cold winter of 2015 we were not really sure how things would go this early in the season. Typically Capt. Jason and his charters start getting into bigger numbers and larger fish later in May and throughout June, regularly competing for the gold pin standard each year in the biggest flounder category in the Mass DMF fishing awards, not to mention running the board in some of the local flounder tourneys.

The first week of the season started slow for Capt. Jason, “dismal” by his estimation. But catch rates steadily increased as water temperatures rose. With the water temperature at 42 degrees during the last week of April, his season kicked off with 0 flounder on the first trip (and a limit of “world class skates,” reported Colby).

From there catch rates steadily increased from 1 to 4 to 6 and so on. Improvement came each day as water temps crept up into the 48 – 49 degree range. Capt. Jason’s desired target temperature ranges between 50 and 62 degrees, with 55/56 being "ideal."

We boarded Little Sister at 6-AM at the public landing at the end of Bayview Street in Quincy. Once onboard we headed north toward Boston Harbor and the Islands.

Capt. Jason likes to use two main techniques:

The key to flounder fishing is fairly simple: use fresh or live bait, get it on the bottom and keep it there. Medium size bait-casting rods are used with flounder rigs and tiny glow sticks attached, with enough lead weight to hold bottom: typically 2 to 5 ounces depending on the tide.

Ron Powers takes his flounder rigs very seriously. He uses a flashing ESCA attractor above flounder hooks rigged with shiny spinners. He even goes so far as to paint his sinkers yellow for greater visibility. Then the sinkers are bounced up and down on the bottom, disturbing sand and silt, attracting attention.

Reels spooled with ultra-thin braid line help you feel those light flounder bites, which are more akin to feeling sudden (extra) weight on the line.

Initially things started out slow. We fished on the drift at the first two stops with no results.

Next we moved over to the Deer Island flats.

There I started things off with a small keeper. We noticed it had the disguising marks (and wounds) of a trawler net escapee.

This fish had survived the draggers outside the harbor during winter only to be tossed in a cooler a few months later.

Capt. Jason pointed out the white markings and identified them as “net rash” (see below photo).

After throwing back a couple shorts Capt. Jason soon followed up with a keeper of his own, and eventually he took the lead. Both Andy and Ron were oddly missing out on the action.

We reasoned it might have partly been due to the mini-glow sticks Jason and I were using on our rigs. So the tackle discrepancy was quickly rectified and everyone was now on equal ground.

What began as a cloudy, foggy morning cleared out and turned into a beautiful, warm, clear sunny day, just the conditions we were looking for. The Boston skyline and Logan Airport served as our backdrop and we watched jet after jet become airborne.

In that time Capt. Jason and I each added 3 keeper flounder to the cooler for a total of 6. Then the bite began to wane with the dropping tide, so we picked up and moved to the lee side of Rainsford Island.

Jason anchored and tossed out the chum pot. Initial results included a couple skates and a few crabs. Then Andy finally got on the board with a keeper flounder.

After another lull, Jason pulled up anchor and we resumed drifting. Both Ron and Andy began hooking up right away, equaling the number Jason and I had caught earlier.

As noontime approached it was a good time to call it quits, a 4-way tie. With a dozen flounder now in the cooler, (the largest of which was about 18 inches), we pulled up and powered our way back to the dock.

Without question, Capt. Jason Colby is one of the most passionate fishermen I’ve ever met. He has to his credit over two dozen striped bass caught over 50 pounds, (with a personal best of 64 pounds).

He has experience working in both commercial and recreational fisheries and has been at it for many years. He is a salty throwback, one who has worked the sea in one capacity or another for decades.

When you fish with Capt. Jason one thing is for sure, you are going to catch fish. His experience in the commercial fishing industry has given him insider knowledge. He knows how everything operates from the commercial trawlers/draggers to the processing plants. He also knows plenty about commercial and recreational rod & reel fisheries and chartering.

He is also an expert at filleting fish! Click play below to see what I mean.

His deep seated passion and concern for the fisheries extends from striped bass to flounder, cod to black sea bass, pogies to ocean herring. He serves on the New England Fishery Management Council Recreational Advisory Panel (RAP) and often vocalizes and writes about his concerns and the effect that a desperate dragger fleet can have on increasingly fragile fish populations and ecosystems.

He believes that increases in winter flounder quotas and the relentlessness of the dragger fleet is having an adverse effect on the Boston Harbor recreational flounder fishery. In a recent email to his e-newsletter subscribers he stated:

“The only body of fish that has not yet been completely wiped out by draggers is in the harbors around Boston, and that is because they were mostly ignored by commercials while they concentrated on cod. Only now that they have wiped out the cod are they turning to flounder. Of the first 30 fish on Little Sister this year, three had "net rash" (marks on their skin consistent with net encounter). The last time I saw that kind of increased dragger evidence was in 2013 when we lost the Month of May and pretty much only had June. When the fish are scarce they decrease both their range and their season. If the draggers "worked on" the offshore bodies of flounder this would not be an issue up and down the coast, but what they have done is target the very same fish that are utilized by recreational anglers.”

As of this writing it remains to be seen how the 2015 Boston Harbor flounder season will progress. But in subsequent trips throughout the following week, Colby reported steady improvement, from good to great to outstanding(!) flounder fishing, which was good news for sure.

In any typical year, the bite will continue to improve throughout May and into June, when it is prime time as larger and larger fish begin showing up.