The old timers never called them hot spots, they referred to their favorite fishing locations as ‘honey holes’. Back in my primitive years we located and returned to those productive places using shore ranges. The gully off Middletown’s Easton’s point that gave up four 50-plus pound stripers, and numerous others of trophy class, was located by using the peak of the inland St Georges School tower with a chimney on the roof of the Clambake Club at the tip of Easton’s Point and abeam it was the tip of Sachuest Point. These Tarpaulin Cove hot spots require only good eyesight, a quality GPS depth sounder and caution to produce the size and numbers of stripers, blues, black sea bass and jumbo scup we have extracted from these locations over the past 50 years.
The rocky eastern corner of Tarpaulin Cove is a gnarly yet very special location which I fish coming and going on almost every single trip I make along the shores of the Elizabeth Islands. There were mornings when I left Woods Hole well before sunup in a Falmouth client’s boat, a man who wanted to fish Sow and Pigs and Quicks Hole as we did in the “old days.” A few those trips found us scratching for a fish and it was locations like those we passed on the way that saved the day. The swift waters at Naushon Point at Robinsons Hole have provided fantastic striper action if you claimed your spot there before the mainland anglers anchored up and began floating chunked or live pogies. We caught our fair share of bass further east at the turn of that island in the rockpiles in 20 feet of water which were also quite popular, but I seldom had serious competition in the rockpiles off Tarpaulin Cove Light, particularly over the bones of the wreck of the schooner Lunet which went down in a winter Gale in 1898.
There were pre-dawn mornings when we would steam directly from West Island in Fairhaven through Robinsons to the eastern edge of Tarpaulin in an effort to be the first anglers to toss big swimmers into those productive rockpiles. I introduced my co-author of Fishable Wrecks and Rockpiles to that honey hole and we extracted a pretty fair number of husky linesiders out of those lairs and lost many more to scrubbed and frayed lines. There were few other places, the Dry Pigs being one of them where plug caster Tim Coleman loved to lob big wood into before the sun peeked over the protective bluffs of Naushon. Once the morning sun it the water, the swimmer action was pretty much all over. At that point I would put out my tube and worm outfits and fish the drop-offs alongside the boulders.
Tim was also a master bucktailer, so we would leave the east corner and move off the Tarpaulin Light House to the wreck site of the Lunet in depths to 60 feet and jig up black sea bass and dinner-plate scup, as well as a few stripers. Electronics of those early days were prehistoric compared to today’s incredible machines and on many trips my 12-inch Humminbird Helix displayed bait and targets of predators that inhabited that area. Before being able to spot lock a location I used a home-made grapnel constructed from bent and welded rebar with a trip line to break free from stubborn hangs. Electronics and tackle have undergone radical innovations, yet with their genetic migratory imprints, these stripers continue to inhabit these cool, highly-oxygenated waters that provide reliable action during the hottest months of the year.
Two years ago, during a late-August heat wave my wife and I each had our limit of stripers in the cooler, and I was jigging while she fished a baited high-lo rig over the bones of the Lunet. I was catching 4- to 5-pound schoolies while my wife hauled keeper sea bass on the west corner of Tarpaulin. When I began cussing the stripers she was surprised “I’ve never heard you cuss at stripers in that manner.” I reminded her that we already had our stripers. It was black sea bass time.
