POINT JUDITH LIGHT, RI
She said it wasn’t what I had promised but there was no way I was passing through the rip without wetting a line. My clients were a local couple who usually steamed to Block Island or Newport to troll for stripers, then bottom fished for fluke and sea bass. Our agreement was that I would take them out in their boat and show them my methods for locating and catching fish. Breezing by very good striper habitat along the way was not in my plans.
As usual, with a southwesterly breeze and an outgoing tide, the rip at the Point Judith Lighthouse was lumpy and littered with lobster pots. At first glance, this is not a very attractive location, particularly if you have a queasy stomach or a guest prone to donating his breakfast to the fish gods. But as far as fishing goes, it’s one of my favorite spots around the Point.
We were headed for Whale Rock and Bonnet Point where we’d be out of the wind and chop, and they would be able to troll in comfort in a craft designed primarily for cruising until the designer added a pair of rodholders. The boat was top heavy but the engine was smooth and I could get it to troll just over two knots even when running in a following sea.
I asked them to humor me and paid out four colors of leadline attached to a baited tube on one of my trolling rods, then stuck it in the port rodholder. I looked up from attaching a sea worm to the second outfit when the woman lurched toward the stern to grab the first rod.
There was not a lot of room between the engine box and the bolster but she squeezed in and finally pried the bent rod from the holder. All that commotion was over a 12-pound bass, but it was the first legal bass they had caught that summer and I was already off the hook. While you can’t troll through the pots, you can work around them and that is what we did. I demonstrated how to decipher the direction of the pot buoys and determine in what direction we could pass them without hanging on the gear.
By the time the second outfit was deployed, we had the aforementioned bass and an eight-pound bluefish beating a tattoo on the bottom of their 120-quart cooler. The husband was doing a yeoman job of navigation between the pots but it was obvious he was anxious for some action, so I spelled him at the wheel.
Most of the bottom around the center of the rip falls off and presents predators with ambush points but I moved off from the shore and headed for a 28-foot spike that had provided me with fish in the 30-pound class. That rock formation is clearly marked on the NOAA chart and the rush of water in either direction makes this easy to read under most conditions.
It required five colors of 36-pound-test on my weighted tubes to put the lures in the strike zone but it didn’t take long for the lines to come tight. We lost the first two fish to abandoned lobster pot warp but they finally bested a 22-pound striper and a four-pound sea bass that was down there duking it out with the stripers and blues. If pot buoys and lumpy water make you nervous, this is not the place for you. But if I was reluctant to fish in those environs, I would be hard pressed to locate stripers. Check out the tide and the lay of the pots, then make a strategic pass. The Point Judith rip has all the ingredients necessary for good striper fishing.
