The alarm went off at 3am and I was already awake.
There are mornings on the water that you sense before they happen — something in the air the night before, a quiet anticipation that keeps you from sleeping too deeply. This was one of those mornings. By 3:30 I was loading gear in the dark, and by 5am, our group was departing the harbor as the sky above the Cape was glowing orange and gold.
The air was cool enough for sweatshirts. The water was a mirror. Not a breath of wind.
5am departure. The harbor was glass-calm and the sky was already glowing.
Joining us for this MFCC group fishing trip was one of MFCC’s most loyal members, Ted Sectish — a man who has fished everything this community has to offer, from tautog to sea bass to stripers — along with MFCC member Chris Roberts and his two sons, Gavin (14) and Jackson (12).
Chris and his family split their time between Connecticut and their family home in South Yarmouth, and Chris came into this trip fresh off both our Surfcasting and Inshore Zoominar Series this past spring. The boys are passionate freshwater anglers back home, spending most of their fishing time chasing largemouth bass an hour from the coast.
Today, they were about to discover a very different kind of bass.
With Captain Tyler Putney of Flatliner Charters at the dock. Tyler put us on fish within 15 minutes of leaving the harbor.
With Ted Sectish (center) and Chris Roberts (left) — two great MFCC members who made this morning one to remember.
The Birds Told Us Everything
We hadn’t even been running fifteen minutes when Tyler cut the throttle.
Ahead of us, a cluster of storm petrels was dancing low over the surface — that nervous, fluttering movement that every striper fisherman learns to read like a road sign. Beneath the birds, the water was alive. Not just rippling. Alive. Squid — foot-long squid — were being driven to the surface by something below, and that something was big, aggressive, and everywhere.
Tyler glanced down at the sonar screen and said something I won’t forget.
The sonar screen at 5:21am. Bass from the surface to the bottom, with clouds of squid marking in between — one of the most remarkable sonar images I’ve seen.
The screen looked like a snowstorm. Bass arching across the display from the surface down to the bottom, with dense clouds of squid marking among them. The water temperature read 67.3°F.
We were sitting right in the middle of a full-scale predator-prey event — tens of thousands of striped bass hunting millions of squid across the stretch of water between Dennis and Provincetown.
We grabbed our rods.
Topwater Mayhem
The lure of choice was a Hogy spook-style topwater — walk-the-dog, side-to-side, splashing across the surface. Any similar plug would have done the job: a Doc, a Specter, anything that mimics an injured baitfish or disoriented squid on the surface. We tried paddle tails and swimmers. The bass weren't interested. They wanted the topwater, and when they hit it, they hit it.
The sound of a large striper destroying a surface lure in flat calm water at dawn is something that gets into your chest. It's not subtle. It's a crack, an explosion, a sound that makes everyone on the boat spin around to see who got the fish.
We were all getting the fish.
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