With local ponds and lakes in full bloom, and fresh migratory stripers slowly but surely beginning to fill in along the coastline, it sure is starting to feel like we are turning the corner here in Massachusetts!

Though local freshwater bass and trout fishing remains excellent, members of the MFCC community are increasingly turning their attention towards the salt, where options are expanding by the day.

In this post, I'd like to highlight just a few of the notable catches I have seen over the past several days from inside our members forum.

Stripers Are Arriving On Cape

Over the past few weeks, reports of bait have been steadily trickling in. In addition to herring, My Fishing Cape Cod community members have reported encountering large clusters of bunker and sand eels.

With no shortage of forage, and the continued arrival of more bait, it is of little surprise that reports of fresh migratory schoolies are finally beginning to materialize with more consistency.

Some MFCC members who've been fishing Buzzards Bay, all the way up to as far as the South Shore, have been rewarded with schoolie stripers over the past week-many carrying sea lice!

The first migratory striped bass of the season have been showing up here and there on the lower Cape and off the Vineyard.

South Shore Bass

And as mentioned above, it also appears that some sparse schools of bass have made it to the South Shore.

MFCC member Billy Mitchell and his friends got on the board the other day with some solid schoolies which were carrying sea lice.?

Chris White began landing schoolies along the South Shore during late April on a Bomber Long swimming plug. 

Chris mentioned that the fish were caught on the ocean side off a jetty, suggesting they were most likely fresh fish and maybe not holdovers.

In any case, be it local holdovers coming out of hiding, or the first new fish of the season, there is certainly no reason not to make a cast at this point.

To read more about Chris's catch, please visit this thread in the forum.

Buzzard's Bay Stripers

MFCC member Alexander Cadete woke up at 2AM the other day and couldn’t go back to sleep, so he figured he might as well try hitting the salt before work.

I suppose it’s a good thing he did, because he ended up catching 2 solid schoolies in the span of an hour!

To read more about Alex's trip, please visit this thread in the forum.

Tim Mugherini has also been getting after some schoolies this past week. Tim suspects that a handful of them are local holdovers, but he's also caught a few fish with sea lice, which can be a sign they were migratory stripers.