Herring, Bass & the Perfect Rip: A Shore Fishing Report from Monday Morning

I could hear the birds before I even reached the water — that sharp, indignant cry cutting through the chilly northwest wind. By the time I got to the shoreline just after 9am, I could see them dipping and wheeling with that nervous energy that always means something is happening down there.

On a gray, damp May morning, with my face already stinging from the cold and my fingers not yet fully awake, those birds were the first good sign.

The second good sign was the water itself.

A rip had set up right at the shoreline — one of those textbook, almost impossibly beautiful rip setups that you spend entire winters dreaming about. From where I stood, the rip line began almost at my feet and stretched northeast for a couple hundred yards, the water moving swiftly from left to right at maybe 4 or 5 mph.

But here was the thing — right along the eastern edge of that rip, the water was dead calm. Glassy. Two completely different worlds separated by a line you could draw with a pencil.

Anglers call this a “seam,” and if you want to catch striped bass, then the seam is a pretty good place to start!

Thinking Like a Bass

As many of us here in the forum are well aware, striped bass are ambush predators. They are built — physically and instinctually — to take advantage of situations where baitfish are disoriented, swept along in current, or otherwise made vulnerable. I think of a seam, where rushing water collides with still water, like a conveyor belt of easy meals. I can envision baitfish getting tumbled in the current, and the bass simply parking themselves right at the edge, in the calm water, to pick them off as they come through.

Low tide had come and gone at 7am. By the time I arrived, the outgoing tide’s current was building toward its peak, and the rip was at full power. The water temperature out in Cape Cod Bay was hovering around 51 degrees — still cold — but here in the estuary, the outgoing water had been sitting in the shallower marshes and flats long enough to warm up a few extra degrees. Call it the high 50s. That might not sound like much, but to a striped bass waking up from a long migration, a few extra degrees of warmth in a current that also happens to be carrying herring is probably about as good as it gets.

Which brings me to the herring.

Following the Herring, and Finding the Bass

Right now, as you read this, one of the most remarkable natural events in New England is unfolding. Atlantic herring and alewives have left the open ocean and are pushing into estuaries, up tidal creeks and rivers, making their way toward the freshwater ponds of Cape Cod where they were born, to spawn.

This happens every spring, and it has happened on this Cape for thousands of years. The Stony Brook run in Brewster is perhaps the most famous, where you can stand on a bridge and watch thousands of fish pushing upstream in a shimmering silver torrent. But it happens in countless other places across the Cape — quieter, less visited, but no less extraordinary.

The striped bass know this.

Big bass — the kind that make your hands shake a little — key in on big baits. A herring is not a small fish. A fat spring herring can run 10 to 12 inches and offers a substantial meal for a striper that has just completed a long migration and is hungry. When bass are locked onto herring, they are not nibbling, they are not cautious. They are aggressive! They will blow up on a lure the way a linebacker hits a quarterback — with full commitment and without apology.

When I’m out there right now trying to find bass, I like to think about where the herring are moving. I fish the mouths of estuaries on the outgoing tide, the beaches near creek mouths, any piece of structure that sits along the natural migration corridor from into the ponds. The herring will be running for the next several weeks. I feel this is one of the best windows of the entire season for shore anglers. Right now, a lot of the fish are where the herring are, and the bait is moving in a predictable, ancient path you can trace on a map.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

I started with a topwater lure — a 1.25oz white Guppy Pencil Popper with the My Fishing Cape Cod (which makes all the difference! LOL). Topwaters are great search lures this time of year. I like to cast them a long way, work them across the surface, and if there are bass in the area they will often swirl on it even if they don’t commit to eating it. It’s like a scouting report. After about ten minutes of nothing, though, I made a change.

I reached into my bag and pulled out a lure I hadn’t thrown in a while — a white 6.5-inch slow-sinking Magic Swimmer.

The moment I clipped it on, I felt a small rush of nostalgia. The Magic Swimmer is a classic, a jointed swimbait that moves through the water with an easy wiggle that is about as close to a real baitfish as a plastic lure can get. In the water, it looks remarkably like a herring — same profile, same lazy swimming action, same flash of white in the current. I had fished it plenty in earlier seasons and forgotten, somehow, how good it was.