This trip happened the morning of April 29th.
If you want the absolute latest from Cape Cod waters — head straight to the MFCC forum right now. In the last 12 hours alone, members have been posting striped bass to 40 inches from boat and shore.
I was up at 3:15am. Again.
I pulled on my waders, grabbed the spinning rod and the fly rod, and made my way to the mouth of an estuary on the Lower Cape — the same system I've been fishing this spring, but this time closer to where it dumps into the bay, not back upstream where I was on April 13th and again on April 27th.
When I stepped into the water it was dark and misty, a chilly northeast wind cutting across my face. The estuary bottom here is a patchwork of firm sand spits separated by soft, dark mud that will swallow you to the knee if you're not paying attention. I stayed in shin-to-knee-deep water and moved carefully — wading estuaries on Cape Cod can be dangerous and demands all of your attention. Step onto the wrong bottom and you're in quicksand.
Before first light I could hear stripers breaking the surface somewhere out in the black water. Wind through the bare marsh grass. No leaves on the trees yet. My hands were already wet and cold, and standing there in the dark I found myself thinking about the Wampanoag and Nauset people who worked these same shorelines for thousands of years — harvesting shellfish, running fish weirs — and the early European cod fishermen working handlines offshore in the dead of winter. We have it easy.
The setup for the morning: Tsunami Carbon Shield II 7'6" fast action 1/4-1oz lure spinning rod with a Shimano Stradic 2500 spooled with 20lb braid and a 30lb fluoro leader.
At false dawn I fired a long cast, letting the northeast wind carry my lure out across the outgoing current sweeping left to right in front of me. Medium-slow retrieve, a few twitches, keeping it just on or beneath the surface. A schoolie crashed it. Then another. Small fish, but I held each one with real gratitude.
These were likely holdover fish — the fresh migratory fish members are posting about in the forum right now hadn't really arrived yet on April 29th. But seeing those young stripers, given how much conversation there is in our fishing community about the lack of juvenile fish, genuinely moved me. I wished each one well as I slipped them back.
First schoolie of the morning. Small but mighty — and a very welcome sight given the concerns around juvenile striper populations.
Here is the lure I've been using all this spring to catch bass from schoolies to 38 inchers. Sometimes simple is better!
Around 6am I began working my way up the estuary, a few hundred yards from the inlet. I tried the fly rod but the northeast wind made it a battle. I delivered the fly into some promising water but had no takers, and eventually switched back to the spinning rod out of pure convenience.
At 7am, with the early sun over my right shoulder and the wind on my right cheek, I made a long cast out and to the left — using the wind to carry the Slug-Go deep into the estuary. The slow twitch retrieve triggered a strike that felt completely different from the schoolies. This fish just inhaled it. I felt her weight immediately. She drove her big broom tail down toward the bottom, then made a run to the east across the estuary, taking my line with her...
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