We left Bass River in the dark.
Well, not quite dark — it was 6 a.m. at Smuggler's Beach in South Yarmouth, and the sky was already doing that early June thing where the light comes on soft and pale, the kind of morning that makes you want to be on the water before you've even had your coffee.
The crew was gathered at the boat launch: myself, Neville Anthony and his daughter Emma, Peter Uchmanowicz, Mark Skalla, Ted Alexiades, and at the helm, Captain Jimmy "the Greek" Koutalakis of On Time Charters. Jimmy was running his brand new 37-foot SeaVee center console — a proper offshore machine — and the conditions that morning were about as good as it gets on Nantucket Sound.
Flat. Calm. Glass.
Shown above is Jimmy’s brand new 37-foot SeaVee center console — a proper offshore machine built for the long run south.
"You almost never see it this calm," Jimmy said as we cleared the river and opened up the throttle. He wasn't exaggerating. Anyone who has made this run knows that Nantucket Sound can turn on you in a heartbeat — a hard southwest wind pushing directly against an ebbing tide and you've got a washing machine out there. But on this particular Wednesday, the sea was offering us a gift. We pointed the bow southeast and ran.
The Run Out
Great Point Lighthouse, Nantucket, on a perfect June morning. Conditions like this don’t come around often — we made the most of them.
Two hours. That's what it takes to reach the grounds Jimmy fishes for big fluke — shoals located 20 to 30 miles south of Nantucket Island. This isn't a quick dart across the Sound to Stonehorse or Handkerchief. This is a commitment, a genuine offshore run that takes you well past Great Point at the north tip of Nantucket, past Sankaty Head Light on the eastern bluff, and out into open Atlantic water where the bottom topology tells a story of ancient glacial action, of sand ridges and channels swept clean by the tides.
This is where the doormats live.
Jimmy has spent decades cracking the code on big fluke. He spent years venturing deeper and deeper, pushed by a driven Korean client who didn't want to keep anything under ten pounds, searching shoal by shoal until he found what the big fish wanted. What they want, it turns out, is depth. Deep-water channels flanked by higher ground on each side, where the current funnels bait like a conveyor belt, and a large, solitary fluke can simply hold on the bottom and wait. These fish aren't schooling up in twenty feet of water with the keeper-sized fish. They're down in sixty, seventy, eighty feet of water — and on some of Jimmy's grounds, over a hundred.
Captain Jimmy “the Greek” holding court on the run out. Thirty years of knowledge — and he doesn’t have an off switch.
On the run out, Jimmy held court. That's part of what you get when you book a trip with Jimmy — you get the fish, but you also get the stories. He's been fishing these waters for over thirty years and he doesn't have an off switch for knowledge.
He talked about the grounds we were heading to, about the bottom structure, about why draggers can't operate there (the uneven seafloor destroys their nets), and why that means these particular shoals hold fish that commercial pressure hasn't reached. He talked about water temperature, about current, about why June is the best month of the year to target fish of this size.
The crew leaned in. This is one of the things I've come to love about these MFCC group trips — the two-hour run each way isn't dead time. It's a masterclass.
Sankaty Light, Nantucket.
Something else caught my eye on the way out. On the horizon to the southwest, the wind turbines of the offshore wind farm south of Martha's Vineyard rose out of the sea like enormous slow-spinning sentinels. I've seen them before, but something about this particular morning — the flat calm, the wide-open visibility — made them hit differently.
These towering structures, planted in the ocean floor in water I've always thought of as wild and borderless, made me pause. I'm not sure how I feel about it, honestly. It's striking in a way that's hard to shake — the reminder that mankind's reach into the natural world has no real boundary, that even out here, thirty miles from shore, the landscape has changed. I sat with that feeling for a while.
Setting Up on the Shoals
On station. Engine off, lines down, drifting the flat-bottomed shoals of doormat country.
Jimmy fishes these grounds with a high-low rig that he's refined over decades. The business end is a Penn Fathom 300 low-profile bait caster — a light conventional reel that allows him to jig all day without wearing out his arm — paired with a rod stout enough to handle 8 to 10 ounce weights in the deeper water.
The rig itself runs a Penn Fusion jig at the bottom, with the hook presentation rigged short and tight. Jimmy's philosophy on bait size runs counter to what a lot of anglers assume: smaller is better. A big bait sounds like it should attract big fish, but what it actually does is give the fish something it can nibble, steal, and never fully commit to. A smaller offering — spearing, squid strip, a piece of Gulp — goes in the mouth all at once.
Spearing is Jimmy's secret weapon. It imitates a sand lance, the small forage fish that fluke absolutely key on, and in his words it's the deadliest bait there is. Tip the jig with spearing and a small piece of Gulp with a curly tail, and you've got something that suspends naturally in the water column while you jig, giving the fish exactly what it's looking for.
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About the author
Ryan Collins
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