The north side of the Elizabeths present excellent opportunities when south winds howl.
Everyone wanted to fish Cuttyhunk and I couldn’t blame them, but trolling Sow and Pigs Reef on a dropping tide that was dumping into a stiff southwesterly wind was not only dangerous, Captain Charlie Tilton considered it suicidal. We were tied up to the New Bedford Yacht Club dock, where one of my clients friends was an officer watching the weather. I told them I would take them fishing in their boat, a 25-foot Grady with twin Mercs, but we were not fishing the Pigs, Devils Bridge or the south side of the Elizabeths. I had taken their friend and his two grandsons to the Elizabeths two weeks earlier and we enjoyed great weather combined with exceptional fishing.
With the photos of that trip fresh in their memory it was overriding their good judgement and putting me in tough spot. “It’s not too bad outside the breakwater,” one of them suggested. I reminded them that we were in the harbor, in the lee and once we cleared Mishaum Point they would be buttoning up their foul weather jackets and reaching for a hand rail.
Finally, I told them that if they wanted to go fishing the south side of Cuttyhunk, real bad, I could guarantee them a real bad and uncomfortable trip.
The Plan
I had their attention! I told them our ride across Buzzards Bay within the next two hours with the wind and tide together would be sloppy but not that uncomfortable once we began to get under the knob provided by the height of Cuttyhunk’s west end pond knoll. I sneaked in around the west side of Penikese and invited two of the men, who were enthusiastic casters, to make a few tosses into the rockpiles along that western shore. The first casts did not produce a hit, but just as Ed was rushing his plug in to get another cast into that bassy looking structure we saw a large boil under the man in the stern’s Captain Bill swimmer. I asked them to hold their casts for a moment and headed toward the nearby Middle Ground Ledge to give them more time and scope to work their lures on a day when I just had that certain expectation that the fish were going to eat. The reality is that in between Penikese and the northeast corner of Cuttyhunk you could close your eyes, make a cast and catch a bass around the countless rocks and ledges that dominate that area.
One very foggy night several years prior, I was cautiously picking my way from the Pigs around the northeast corner of Cuttyhunk to avoid the dangerous, and unpredictable Canapitsit Chanel on the south side when – what the Cuttyhunk skippers referred to as – the Black Fog settled over us forcing me to anchor up in 10 feet of water alongside White Rock. I did not dare move any further. We heard the slap of a bass tail and tossed the Atom popper on my spinning rod toward the sound and hooked up immediately. My mate, Andy, removed the bucktail from the wire line outfit and snapped it on his spinner and connected on his first cast.
The fog moved in and out and occasionally we heard a boat, one most likely equipped with radar, moving along the Nashawena shore heading for the harbor. We could have left for the harbor at any time after our first five or six fish, but we stayed there, held by the cooperative stripers. We quit at daylight and around the corner out of sight of the guides dock we counted out 33 stripers which we packed in two wooden boxes covered in wet burlap which later totaled 204 pounds on the Drapes Fish Market scale. The yellowed turned copies of those transactions you may have seen in the pages of this magazine. I mention that trip to illustrate that Cuttyhunk’s south side is not the only place that produces stripers; the north side also has some very good fishing.
A Northern Contingency
The backside of Penikese and the rockpiles at Knox Point on the northeast corner of Nashawena Island are minefields of rocks and boulders where a well-placed cast before first light or after sunset can usually earn you a strike. The north side of the Elizabeths has a wealth of rocky shorelines that are bass magnets under low light conditions and when the south side is unfishable due to gusty winds I troll my tube and worm rigs along the deeper edges of the north side and find action in places where I almost never see another boat.
My gut feelings about a good bite proved accurate. We coaxed four decent stripers off the Penikese rockpiles then moved to Knox Point where the edge of the southwest wind made up enough white water to excite and turn on stripers from teens to a handful of 20-pound fish. I broke out the tube and worm trolling outfits to cover that area from Knox to North Rock at the Buzzards Bay entrance to Quicks Hole where we found two boats anchored up, chunking in a place I had intended to cast plugs.
Just a glimpse through the hole at the white-capped waters of Vineyard Sound convinced my deckmates that we had made the right decision, the kicker being the two high-teen fish we had tubed up along Nashawena’s north shore. It can get a mite rough crossing the north face of that hole with the tide dumping as we caught the edge of the southwest and outgoing that were churning these exposed waters.
On Rugged Shores
When we arrived at the impenetrable rocky shoreline of Pasque the owner of the boat declared this was not the place for a boat to lose power or run too close to. Robinsons can be a hell hole for skippers unaccustomed to fast water and tight spaces as the channel winds through the gauntlet of rocks and tidal rips. Now that the Coast Guard replaced the steel buoys that would lay down, and almost disappear under the force of the currents, with buoyant markers with heavy floatation rings it’s a bit of an easier steam. I would motor in and out of the hole looking for the bulges where the buoys were, to stay on the deeper side of the buoys. I know of a few incidents where boats hit those steel buoys and were incapacitated, but it never happened when I was transiting. I never shut my engine down when we are plugging rocks and washes so with a southwest wind we were blown off the beach and into deeper water each time we completed an “in tight” session.
We made four or five drifts from the eastern corner of Pasque along the undulating shores of Naushon where we had a few hits, a couple of follows and swirls while hooking two more low- to mid-teen bass. I began turning to make another pass when the very grateful owner tapped me on the shoulder and asked what I thought about a relaxing dinner with his crew at the Sail Loft restaurant back in Padanaram Harbor. I nodded in the affirmative.
Before our trip back to the harbor, I trimmed the boat by rearranging the coolers and had the crew sit on them on the aft starboard corner. The big Grady liked her bow at a northwest angle to the seas so I found her sweet spot and locked her onto a course that was comfortable and primarily dry. As my mentor, Captain Larson would say “tuck her into the rocking chair and carefully ride the backs of the swells back to the barn.” It was a slow, yet comfortable trip across Buzzards Bay under the kind of conditions the Bay is notorious for.
Over the past 45 years I’ve learned where to fish along these productive shores but I’m never entirely comfortable running someone else’s boat there. Naushon has a long curving shoreline right up to the Weepecket Islands (which we will describe in a future article) but it’s an even bet that those skippers who begin these outing at Pennikese in the lee of a snotty southwester won’t normally run this far because between casting plugs and trolling the tube and worm, they’ll usually have all the action they were looking for behind them.
| RUNNING THE ROCKS |
The Elizabeth Islands can be a treacherous place. Between the powerful currents that build as Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound exchange water through Woods Hole, Robinsons Hole, Quicks Hole and Canapitsit Channel, along with the many hidden boulders that would love nothing more than to ruin your prop, ding your hull or shear off your lower unit, there are a few precautions every angler that casts a plug in these hallowed waters should always take.
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