The birds always know first.
Wednesday, October 7th. Sunrise on Cape Cod Bay. Flat calm, a gentle swell rolling in, barely a whisper of wind. The tide had been coming in for about two hours, and the sky was doing that thing where it turns the whole bay pink and gold.
Then I heard them.
Terns screaming. Gulls squabbling. And underneath it all, the sound that makes every surfcaster’s pulse jump: the slap of striped bass busting the surface, chasing peanut bunker into the wash.
That’s been the story of these past few weeks on the Cape. Find the birds, find the bait, find the bass. I didn’t pick this beach because of a hunch or a tide chart. I picked it because the birds told me to.
When the terns start talking, you start walking (or running)!
Session One: The Thud
I opened the morning of October 7 with a pencil popper, and it didn’t take long. First cast, maybe the second, came a great hit on top from a beautiful little bass.
But here’s the thing about blitzes: they move! As the tide pushed in, the bass herded the peanut bunker right up into the nearby estuary like sheepdogs. I followed, and the birds were going bananas all over again.
I sent up the drone to get a bird’s-eye view of the blitz, and what I saw was striped bass stemming the tide over a sandy bar, holding in the current and waiting for bait to sweep past.
Could I have kept throwing topwater? Absolutely. But I felt like doing something different, so I tied on a 1 oz white bucktail.
The technique: The current was ripping right to left. I cast up-current and just let the jig tumble along the bottom, kicking up little puffs of sand the way a fleeing baitfish might.
Thud.A bucktail bite is different from a topwater blowup. It's not an explosion. It's a heavy, unmistakable stop. That fish measured 30½ inches and used every ounce of that current against me!
Want to know what happened next?
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