It was time to turn my attention to the salt. I’d noticed plenty of alewives and herring appearing in the creeks around my neighborhood, starting the next generation right among the bluegill and carp. As I grew more comfortable in the local freshwater, heading to the nearby back bays and acquainting myself with arguably the most popular sport fish in Massachusetts sounded like a natural progression.
I’d had a nice return to the striper scene post-West Coast when I spent most of April in New Jersey, but had missed a good chunk of time over the last few weeks with the move. With increasingly better reports and a slightly below-confident idea of what I was doing, I prepared to revamp my hunt for some local bass. There was just one mission in the salt I had to complete first.
It had been almost a year since I’d fished this tiny, unassuming creek on the Cape. Most of the sea-run brook trout streams in the area have been relatively well documented and preserved, but finding native trout in these muddy coastal waters still feels like you’re uncovering some sort of secret. The creek was at low tide when I fished it for a morning last fall, but in this instance I had timed it out to see how it looked with its banks full. I slowly walked and scanned my way upstream until I arrived at the first cluster of logs. There, holding steady among the schools of nervous herring, were a few darker mottled shapes that greeted my swung bugger with enthusiasm.
There was one log in particular where I’d pulled out a few small brookies, but I swore I had seen bigger fish holding in the shadows. I figured I’d run the tried and true jigging technique around the structure if I could sneak up close enough, but in classic clutch fashion I snagged my streamer on the log on my first drop. I basically had to get into the water right next to it to get the fly back back. In a last ditch effort I sent the streamer back down from my new position, and to my surprise felt it get sucked under the log by a fish significantly bigger than the ones I had encountered so far. It was still just ten or eleven inches, but for a trout nerd like me the PB salter made my week.
Now I could focus on bass. My buddy Jon had heard decent reports from some spots North of town, so I headed up with him a few days after my brookie outing. We wadered up and started our walk into the salt marsh, dodging ancient dock pilings and seemingly bottomless mud pits on our way to the water. The spot was a bend in a side channel of a side channel, subtle from almost all angles until you were almost on top of it. It was only there you could see the long, deep hole on the downstream side of a center-channel sandbar.
It was juicy looking water, confirmed by the schoolie that Jon caught almost almost immediately. A few minutes later, my own clouser got eaten right off of my rod tip at the end of a retrieve. I could fascinate you readers with the harrowing fight that ended with hoisting my first Massachusetts striped bass for the camera, but I’ll just share a picture of the monster and let you envision it for yourselves.
When fishing in a new place it’s good to begin from a platform you’re very familiar with, like trout or catching small fish. You have to start somewhere, right?