I'd been hearing about good eel fishing at Lighthouse Beach lately so I thought
I'd give it a try on Sunday night. I've learned that Chatham is not a place to
get your hopes too high about, at least from shore. You take what you can get and
the place runs hot and cold. But when it's hot, it has big fish potential.
Well, sure enough, after about 5 trips to Lighthouse Beach coming up empty,
the fishing gods decided to be kind. At about 9 PM, some nice ones swarmed close to the
wash and hit eels with abandon. I had one 40 incher (biggest of the year for me
so far), a 36 incher, and a 34 incher, all within the space of 45 minutes, at
which point the bite suddenly stopped. I also had a couple of other runs which
I got a little sloppy on and allowed the fish to break free. I was also using
circle hooks for the first time. There is no question that the hookup ratio is
better with these than the usual short shank octopus hooks that I usually use. One
fish was gut hooked, but the two others were neatly hooked in the corner of the
mouth.
The rest of the weekend was pretty dead. Had a few runs at Brewster Flats with
sand eels but they were half-hearted at best. The guys with snakes were doing
slightly better, but there were only three fish caught amongst 8 people out
there on the tide I was fishing.
The Canal seemed to slow down a bit for lure fishing. There were plenty of birds
working opposite the Sandwich power plant and also near the Martime Academy at
the west end, but the fish weren't interested in artificials.
The ones at the west end were working over a school of blues in
the middle of the day; boat after boat would blast through the school and the blues
would continue to feed on sperling like nothing was happening.
-bd