PAWN ROCK OFF LITTLE RIVER, MA
It’s a pretty inconspicuous location, but occasionally they are the ones that produce the best action. For years, I passed this location to and from more popular spots such as Mishaum Point and Gooseberry Island. But every time I looked at a chart, there was something about Pawn Rock at Barney’s Joy Point that suggested there was much more there than met the eye.I believe it was during an early season goose hunt up inside of Little River in South Dartmouth that we became aware of the size and number of stripers that moved way up into this narrow river to feed. One pre-dawn October morning, we pushed the canoe around a bend in the river. A rolling boil appeared as two or three big stripers were flushed from a cutback along the edge of the river, leaving a huge wake as they bolted away from the long, dark shadow of our canoe. Canada geese were our primary target but stripers were the conversation that early fall morning.
When I kept a boat at the Concordia yard in Padanaram, if we weren’t making daily runs to Cuttyhunk and Pasque Island, we concentrated on striper fishing from Round Hill Point, Mishaum Point and Ledge and the rock piles on the east side of Gooseberry. On one morning with a stiff northeast wind making conditions very difficult on those exposed fronts, I turned the corner at Mishaum and hid in the lee of the west side of Mishaum where we spent a pleasant interval catching a few schoolies and small bluefish on topwater lures. This was on the top of the high flood but about an hour after the tide began to drop, we noticed birds circling over Barneys Joy Point in the area of Pawn Rock and decided to check it out. The southeast corner of that point is a gnarly spot with numerous rocks just under the surface and a few exposed boulders that set up a pretty good wash on a stiff southwest or southeast wind. That was the case that day. With the stern grapnel at the ready, I set up a drift that would take us along but not onto the point. I still had my light spinning outfit with the small popper attached and when it hit the white water, the plug disappeared. A quality fish grabbed it and ran around the inside of the rock, rubbing off the 20-pound leader. My deckmate was using a bucktail jig and he was only able to move it a few feet before another fish of similar proportions came to the surface, shook its head and spit the jig back at him. I powered out and upwind of the point while we racked the light gear in favor of heavier striper gear. On the next pass, a 15-pound striper crunched the head of the medium Danny surface swimmer and with a tight drag, I was able to wrest it away from the rocks. We picked up three fish from 12 to 18 pounds that morning and lost a few more.
From that day on, I never passed this location without stopping to probe those rocks and have found that the low tides usually produced the best action. Captain Roland Coulombe of Cuttyhunk fame rented a cottage on Little River and told me about the size and number of stripers he caught from up inside the river all the way out to Pawn Rock which he navigated in his shallow draft skiff. A sharpie from CMS Enterprises in New Bedford has been known to yank some braggin’ sized tautog from Pawn Rock and the shoreline at Barney’s Point but at this time, that person shall remain unnamed.
