Mark- I feel your pain! This is the time of the year when the fish on the flats become extremely selective. I found that they prefer crab flies over almost anything else this time of year. I spent last week fishing the flats around Nantucket. One day, Steve Swain and I must have seen close to 200 fish throughout the day, most of which turned away from our offerings. When we finally landed a whopper, we examined its stomach contents and found several medium-sized crabs in its stomach, but nothing else. All the crabs appeared to be approxmately the same size (about the size of a silver dollar) This tells me it was selecting only crabs, and only crabs of about the same size. That significantly decreases your chances of tricking them when they are so keyed-in on a particular food. What worked was this: Although we saw so many fish that day, they were mostly all singles and doubles, very few schools. The big fish swainer got was travelling in a school of 10-15 30"+ fish right after the tid
e went from slack low. The fish that were traveling in a school were much more receptive to our offerings than the singles and doubles we were seeing. In fact swainer got his big fellow on an olive over white clouser with a 4" wire leader! I guess the trick is to use crabs right on the bottom, or look for the roaming schools of fish.