Picture if you can a venue where bass in the eight to ten pound bracket are so common that the skipper doesn't even bother getting out the landing net, preferring to land them by hand. A few seconds might be given over to admiring the thing, then its back into the water without so much as a second thought. If I also add that the reason for all the haste is so that the fishing can recommence in the very realistic hope that the next bass along with top the twenty pounds, then I suspect I will have grabbed your attention.
A location does exist where you can do all of the above, as long as you don't mind your bass having stripes along their flanks. I am of course talking here about the American striped bass. The venue is a small New England town called Chatham on the Cape Cod peninsula just south of Boston Massachusetts. I was fortunate enough to spend a week there in the company of four other like minded anglers where we experienced some of the best guided boat fishing I taken part in in many a long time. The boats there are mainly 18 to 20 foot flats skiffs or Boston whalers with typically American monster outboards. They normally carry two or three anglers and the standard of these guides is second to none. For once they were not in your face all the time. They would show you what to do then leave you to get on with it, which was good.
The most productive method without any doubt was a light spinning outfit casting leadheads in the half to one ounce range armed with soft rubber worm known as a sluggo. Unlike jellyworms used over here in the UK, sluggo's don't have a flat or curly tail. They simply taper away not unlike an elongated garden slug which gives them very little in-water movement to excite the fish. But they must have something because they are absolutely lethal. Sluggo's come in a range of sizes and colours. We found the six inch version in grey suited our needs best. We would simply lob them out, wait for the leadhead to touch bottom, then start cranking them back in giving them little tweaks along the way.
At some marks it was quite literally a fish a chuck, and you genuinely didn't know if the next take would be from a five pounder or a twenty. And as the tackle was so light, each and every fish gave a fantastic account of itself. Stripers fight every bit as hard as European bass, so you can imagine how good a twenty feels on a light seven foot spinning rod and small fixed spool loaded with 12 pounds bs line. But as good as the bass are, they are nothing compared to bluefish which we also hooked by the bucket full, though we didn't always land them due to them biting the sluggo's off. You really need to be fishing wire if you are deliberately targeting blues. Yet the Americans don't like them. We also picked up a few false albacore which make even bluefish pale into insignificance.
From our sailing time of around 8 am to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, it was typically end to end action. So much so that sometimes when a bluefish had bitten most of my sluggo's body from the hook, I wouldn't bother replacing it until the guide insisted, preferring to have a bit of a breather and get the feeling back in my arms. To be honest, there were times when you wondered if you could physically take any more. But of course when another big fish takes hold, you always manage to find the energy from somewhere, particularly when the boat was being lined up for a new drift. The sounder screen would be showing fishy targets everywhere from the surface to the bottom 30 feet under the hull. So you knew that sooner or later something was going to stop your sluggo dead in its tracks. There was no escaping that fact.
After catching all the stripers, bluefish and albacore anyone could ever want on sluggo's, Ian Gaskell who was sharing the boat with me decided to give it a go on the fly. As a keen reservoir trout man back home, this had been his main driving force behind enlisting for the trip and he was very quickly rewarded with a grand slam. Obviously, the gear used was made of slightly sterner stuff than a weight 7 reservoir outfit. The rod was a purpose built Grey's Oceanic weight 10 with a Hardy's saltwater fly reel sporting a slipping clutch. Six feet of 12 pounds bs mono was used for a leader with a short wire tippet so as not to loose too many flies to the bluefish. As for the fly patterns, Ian had tied up a selection of baitfish imitations such as clouser minnows and sandeels on hooks in the size 4 to 1/0 range. But with hindsight, he need not have taken his fly gear over as the guides provide high quality Orvis saltwater fly outfits on the boats.
Although not as productive in terms of numbers of bass, bluefish and albacore caught, the challenge that fly fishing brings made even me want to give it a go, and I had my knuckles well rattled on a number of occasions by the reel handle and the sheer power of a bluefish. Most of the fish were taken on a sinking line, though on some occasions, when the fish were up at the surface marked by diving terms, you could pick them up on a floating line and floating lures incorporating ethafoam, which Ian did. When the bass and bluefish were up on the top scattering the fry shoals, a fry pattern stripped through the general area would more often than not get a response. But the lure of the getting one of the bigger bass kept bringing him back to the sluggo's which caught him bass of 20 and 21 pounds. Double figure fish were quite common place with everyone getting them well up into the high teens. Best bass on the fly was a little over 15 pounds
