Winter Birds and Summer Fish

October had been a washout. At one point there were nine straight days of rain. The foliage came and went in a soggily unspectacular performance. November arrived, and I was prepared to face the long, the dark, and the cold.

Suddenly, a reprieve. The forecasters called for the Saturday temperature to reach seventy, with light wind from the southwest. I returned home Friday evening to find a message from my friend Sean, a fishing writer, who was wondering if schoolie stripers were still lurking in the harbors along the north shore of the Cape. If I had any interest in finding out, I should be at his house at 5:30 Saturday morning. I was there, my St. Croix rod in hand.

We towed his 18’ Parker across the Sagamore Bridge and launched it in the safety harbor at the east end of the Cape Cod Canal. By 6:30 we were watching the sun rise over Cape Cod Bay, making 30 knots east over calm seas. We were less than optimistic. The water temperature was down to 51 degrees, more to the liking of cod than bass. And the birds were wrong--they were winter birds.
A huge gannet soared overhead, reminding us that it is November. Then we began to see flock after flock of sea ducks, scoters and eiders, that are not common close to shore in the warmer months. As we cruised a half-mile off Sandy Neck in Barnstable, we startled a contingent of brants, small geese that breed in the Arctic and winter along the east coast. The winter birds, despite their beauty, were hardly harbingers of good striper fishing.

As we turned into Barnstable Harbor, we passed a duck hunter with a blind on the beach and a flotilla of scoter decoys. “Half a mile in,” he shouted, “there’s stripers feeding like crazy.” We rounded the headland and saw what every fisherman loves to see: gulls, terns, and cormorants working the surface in a frenzy. The bass were chopping up baitfish, and the birds were glutting themselves on the remnants.

We circled the boat around the school so that the tide would draw us along beside it. We both cast soft plastic shad into the maelstrom, and both hooked up by the third crank of the reel. Two eighteen-inch schoolies came aboard. Stripers are delicious to eat, but “keeper” size is twenty-eight inches, so the schoolies were released unharmed.

The pattern began. We would glide the boat up to the edge of the squawking birds, make five or six casts apiece, and boat three or four fish. The smallest was about fourteen inches, the largest, twenty-four. None were keepers, but we were catching them cleanly and releasing them unharmed. The most difficult part of it all was to avoid snagging a bird; the only other boat to discover this bonanza did just that.

By noon, we had caught and released more the 100 bass. We were giddy in a way only a fisherman can understand. We headed back toward the Canal, munching sandwiches and watching loons making their hump-backed flights along the shore. We had seen winter birds, but caught summer fish. We had stolen a day of summer in November. This year, the winter will seem a bit shorter.