MFCC Intern

Despite the recent stretch of less-than-stellar weather, local ocean water temperatures have pushed into the mid 50’s, and striped bass fishing along the Massachusetts coastline is yielding consistent success, with larger fish being caught more frequently by the day. Most notably, migratory fish in the 30 inch range and beyond are becoming increasingly common.

In addition to more summer-like striper action, black sea bass, flounder, and tautog fishing has produced much more encouraging results over the past few weeks, and there is no sign of any of that slowing down! The MFCC community has had an excellent week of fishing. 

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.

Please scroll below to continue reading! 

Striped Bass and Blues

To cap off the week’s striper action, MFCC’s own Ryan Collins landed this big striper from shore in the stormy weather! 

With fish like this stirring around in May, we have a very bright fishing season ahead of us!

Though many of the standard surfcasting plugs, poppers and jigs have been performing fine on the striper front recently, it can be sometimes be easy to forget about the magic of the fly!

Fly-fisherman John Kingston (@Jkingston) recently got after some solid schoolies, noting that there was definitely “some size around”. This fish that John landed on the fly was just under slot size.

In addition, MFCC member Graham Stevens (@stephgr1) recently got out on the water and encountered some schoolie action, with the majority of fish caught measuring over 20”. 

Graham said the fish surrendered when they saw his MFCC hat, I can’t blame them!

MFCC Member Tim Mughjerini (@bugbear) is always getting after some nice fish, and provided great insight on his recent experiences in the forum.

Despite the unfavorable winds, Tim has been grinding it out and has found the best success throwing bone and white mag darters and small white wood darters in the 5 inch range at night.

He notes that the fish still seem to prefer the smaller bait profile at the moment. He has also recently landed a handful of slot fish and even one fish pushing up to 20 pounds! 

Tim also mentions that he has observed a sufficient amount of silversides, squid, green crabs, and a large amount of adult bunker around in terms of bait species.

Though most of the larger striper being caught along the Massachusetts coastline at this time are just pushing slot size, it’s theoretically not too early to land yourself a much larger fish.