
Fifty years of bass fishing on Cape Ann
If Tom Brady had grown up within walking distance to saltwater, had a father and grandfather who fished commercially and applied his legendary attention to detail and discipline toward learning how to fish for striped bass, he might be as good a bass fisherman as Al Williams. Al has caught more 50-pounders than Tom has won Super Bowls, but they both are laser-focused on their craft and the results speak for themselves.
For the record, Al’s biggest bass was 64 pounds, and at 73 years old, he is still in the game.

Dialed & Dedicated
The formula for consistently catching striped bass at Al’s level, is easy to understand, but hard to do, because it requires a very serious commitment of time. For the last 50 years, Al’s priorities have simply been family, work and bass. As we all know, bass behavior is closely aligned with bottom structure, current and wind direction. Add in the availability of baitfish along with water temperature and that gives you five basic variables that are constantly changing. Just imagine what Al’s 50 years of experience have taught him about the 15-mile stretch of shoreline that he calls home.
THE INVALUABLE FISHING LOG |
We all know we should keep a detailed logbook of our fishing trips, but how many of us do it? Someone that has the discipline to do it, such as Al, can tell you the direction of the wind and the stage of the tide on the morning of August 8th, 1976 when he caught two very nice fish and some smaller ones, as well. Starting in 1975, Al began recording the details of every trip he made. When you open the logbook, the right-hand page notes the date, location(s), wind direction, tide, fishing technique and pounds landed. On the left there are additional notes such as the abundance of bait, what other guys might have caught etc. Al notes that, “The key to maintaining a log book is to keep it next to your favorite chair, so you see it and do something about it.” |
Notable biographies often point to a transformative moment in a child’s life that forever shapes their life’s path. “I can remember it vividly”, says Al. “I was 8 or 9 and staying with my aunt and uncle, whose house was directly on the Annisquam River, in sight of the A. Piatt Andrew Bridge. The room I slept in was on the second floor. On warm summer nights, I would prop myself up on my elbows, looking out the open window towards the bridge, waiting for the Coleman lanterns to light up at the base of the bridge. My uncle had told me that those were the lanterns of striped bass fishermen, who fished through the night and caught stripers that were almost as long as I was tall. I was mesmerized by the mystery of it all and those gigantic fish that were caught in the middle of the night”.
If you want to catch large bass on a consistent basis, it is really important that you bend your diurnal habits to allow for leaving the house at 2 a.m. and getting back a few hours after daylight. Al worked 33 years for Gorton’s of Gloucester, a large company that produces frozen seafood meals. When you’re working full time and are committed to your wife and marriage, you do what you have to, to make time for bass fishing. Being intentional about your priorities and practicing good time management are just as important as having a bait well full of pogies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, when the bite was north of Cape Ann, it was common for Al to trailer his 16-foot aluminum skiff to the ramp in Gloucester at 2 a.m. He’d run north up the Annisquam River, out into Ipswich Bay, along Plum Island, then across the bar at the mouth of the Merrimack River and up the river beyond the I-95 bridge, to net pogies. As the sky began to lighten, he’d drop back down the Merrimack to fish those pogies at Badger Rocks, or Emerson Rocks, catch two to four good bass, then head back to the boat ramp in Gloucester. He’d haul the boat, go home, put the fish on ice and then head to work. Most of us don’t have the energy to keep up that kind of schedule, but if you can do it, you can access a whole world of striper activity that is ongoing while the rest of the world sleeps.

A Fishy Family
Al’s Dad, Alvin Sr., quit high school to work on his Dad’s 90-foot dragger, The Dolphin, which fished for deepwater groundfish 80 miles offshore, even in the winter. Working offshore in the winter is a hard life and he later took a job at O’Donnell-Usen, (another Gloucester-based consumer seafood company), which meant he was home every night and it was far less dangerous. In the summer, Al Jr. would go as sternman on his Dad’s lobster boat, filling bait bags and sorting the lobsters. Like learning to grab a snake behind the head to avoid being bitten, a ten year old boy develops fast hands to avoid the claws of a lobster, (which can break your finger).
“My dad was a fishy guy”, says Al, “Some people just seem to have an extra sense that helps them catch fish and lobsters. I took my dad bass fishing with live pogies at daybreak amid the sandbars off Crane’s Beach. It was early on in my bass fishing career and the rod and reel in my dad’s hands was not of the same quality as those lined up in my basement now. The fish took the pogie in 6 feet of water, Dad set the hook well and as the spool spun, dumping line during the fish’s first run, the reel seat came apart causing the reel to spin loosely around the rod. Dad had a special quality about him that helped him catch fish. The reel was barely attached to the rod, but in less than 10 minutes, he had that 57-pounder subdued and over the rail!”

The Striperman Evolves
Growing up in Gloucester during the 1960s was to be surrounded by fish and fishing boats. Catching food fish to feed the nation was a hard, but honorable way to make a living. It was perfectly natural that the boy who lobstered with his Dad, would want to land fish and lobsters from his own boat. In the late 1960s half the boats in most harbors were still made of wood. Al’s first boat was a 16-foot Amesbury Skiff, a rugged lapstrake wooden boat with a 35 hp outboard. He fished 70 wooden lobster traps in Gloucester Harbor through high school and college. Stripers and lobsters share some of the same habitat and Al began to become aware of large and small bass in the wash where he was setting his traps.
You don’t need a large boat to catch your share of bass. Al’s first three bass fishing boats were aluminum, two 16-foot Mirrorcrafts and a 16-foot Duranautic, these vessels were remarkably seaworthy, particularly with a full baitwell, easy to launch and great for fishing in boulder-filled waters of less than 10 feet deep. He sized up a few times over the years and now runs a 20-foot Maritime Skiff with a 90 hp Honda. It goes through the water great and turns on a dime when a boulder gets in the way. All of his boats have been named Night Shift.

Reading The Signs
HISTORY IN THESE PAGES |
![]() Al was a good friend of our late editor, Tim Coleman, and Al penned a few articles for The Fisherman. Tim reciprocated by putting photos of Al’s large bass on the cover and writing a few stories about Al’s methods. Tim would show up with coffee and donuts, giving a “how’s Al today?” greeting, while lugging a bag full of photo equipment, designed to bring bad luck. Al’s job was to maintain his focus and put some fish in the boat. In October of 1986, Tim published a story based on bass fishing with Al, complete with a map and arrows. Tim also penned a lighter side article in August of 1992, lampooning how a writer named Tim DeWreck cajoled Mr. Al Quiet to take him bass fishing. In Tim’s fictional story, the subsequent issue of “The Fish Book” included a cover photo of Al with a donut in his mouth and loran numbers for all the locations they’d fished. Al and Tim also fished Block Island a number of times in the late fall, having decent bass pound their dark needlefish in the wash as the waves drained back off the beach. One of Al’s regrets is never having made the time to fish tarpon at night with Tim, under the bridges of the Florida Keys. |
Not to be disrespectful, but bass are much like raccoons and crows. They are opportunistic feeders. One month they will be in pure fresh water, feeding on alewives as they gather below a fish ladder and at another time they will be 30 miles offshore, feeding amid the bluefin and whales. Al likes plugging and chunking, but his favorite approach is trolling live pogies. His thousands of nights fishing have meant a lot of time fishing with eels, but he feels that pulling a live baitfish 80 feet behind the boat is like pulling a “bass meter”.
Sometimes the bait gets blasted out of the water as a big bass in a feeding mood tries to stun, then swallow that bait. Other times, the bait gets nervous as one or more bass take up a casual pursuit, but there is no take. Exactly where and when that bait became skittish is valuable information. It could be that the tide is not yet right for those fish to begin feeding, but that nervous bait underscores an opportunity that should be revisited either later that day or the next.
Al recommends that, “if you want to fish with pogies or mackerel, you will be well served to have a full bait well while it’s still dark, so that you can be where you want to start fishing just as it starts to get light”. When fishing solo, he finds that trolling two rods, each with a live pogie can be a recipe for having to sit out optimum fishing time untangling your baits. A better strategy is to fish a pogie on one rod and a mackerel on the other because they swim differently. Of course, fishing two rods when solo works better when the bass are in 90 feet of water, rather than when you are weaving in and out of the boulders and ledges in 15.
Surface water temperature can change overnight due to the direction of the wind. This is particularly true in the fall. A wind coming off the land will blow the warmer surface water offshore and generally cool the fishing as well. On a blustery fall day, when the water temperature has cooled quickly due to a change in the wind direction, Al suggests fishing up in the tidal rivers or in a protected harbor where that surface water is measurably warmer than the nearshore open ocean.
Latest Observations
“Times are a-changing here on Cape Ann”, says Al. “It seems that seasonal movements of the bass may be happening earlier than they did 10 years ago, including aggregating into dense schools that are feeding and moving together during July and August, rather than September as in years past”. Sometimes we’d like to believe that the variables affecting bass behavior will be more or less the same this year as they were 5 years ago, but ecosystems and the physical variables that drive them are always in flux.
Fifty years of logbook entries is a lot of data, but a good fisherman is as flexible and opportunistic a predator as the bass he pursues. With rising water temperatures, we may be now seeing aggregations of bass around Cape Ann that were more typical of Cape Cod and the Elizabeth Islands, ten years ago. It seems there are more concentrated bodies of fish now, with fewer fish populating those living-room-sized spots than there were 5 years ago. Al notes that these new aggregations of bass contain a lot of decent-sized fish, but virtually all of his fish over 50 pounds have come from those smaller locations right in the ‘sweet spot’, of tide, wind and baitfish conditions.
Next spring, the Night Shift will be outfitted with some new electronics. As bass habits change so too will Al’s fishing techniques.