- Surf Highlights Fishing Reports

We just can’t win right now! Three weeks in a row, we’ve suffered through a powerful wind event that has offered some epic fall fishing, but, in most cases, the damage has outweighed the good. I don’t know if you’ve looked at the calendar, but it’s November now, and we’ve just passed my least favorite day of the year, the end of daylight savings time! Oh how I wish we could just spring ahead and stay there… but I digress. The volatile mix of November beginning on the heels of a storm requires a specialized approach. At least for me, but maybe I’m just getting older and lazier. With the uncertainty that follows a late blow like this one, I find that the best bet is to fish a high-probability spot during an optimal tide window and keep hitting that spot night after night until you find fish. I also suggest fishing as ‘easy spot’ – meaning one that doesn’t require a marathon hike to get to. I do these things to make it easier to keep things honest, the fish will tell you when it’s time to branch out again and hit multiple spots. For me, high-probability spots include the tips of prominent points, spaces between islands and any river or inlet mouth. If I’m on a shallow point, I will fish the lightest needle the surf will allow me to throw, and when it’s dead calm, I throw needles that I can crawl so slowly that I can barely make it through the retrieve. I also make sure to have some small needles on my, down to 4.5 inches, sometimes that tiny profile is the key. In the inlets and rips, I will darters, swimmers and jigs, again sticking with a diverse selection of sizes and always trying to find ways to fish as slowly as the current and surf will allow. In all these cases, if your bite window is closing without action, don’t leave before you throw an unweighted soft plastic a few times, like a Slug-Go, there’s something about those softies that will draw strikes when wood and hard plastics, just won’t.

No rest for the weary, after a couple days of stable weather, the fans come back on and I’d say that wraps things up, north of the Cape. For my money this week, I’d focus on Buzzards Bay for stripers, but I wouldn’t rule out a few along the Falmouth shoreline. If you happen to be on the Vineyard, I think the south side inlets may still hold a few bonito if you want to notch that rare November exotic.