Saturday found me on the Cape and at liberty in the high tide region of the afternoon, so I decided to check out the storied Monomoy Flats -- figuring to fish the couple of hours that the flats drain. I got the last ride out on the Rip Ryder, but the guy who runs it said that a falling tide into a southwest wind set up too stiff a chop to sight fish and insisted on dropping me on the lee side of North Monomoy to fish the channel between it and South Beach. He pointed to a couple of guys on the beach who he said were the Orvis crew and their sports, but the only fishing was to the the dropoff into the channel and the channel was like the brickyard at Indy with turbo-charged boats roaring through every 57 seconds. I can't say that there were no fish in the channel because a couple of mackeral chunkers caught a couple of 34/36"ers, but I also didn't get a shot at laying down a long cast at a spooky flats bass. (In short, it sucked).
The word from the Rip Ryder guy on the way back in was that flyfishers usually go out on his first AM trip at 8:00 regardless of the tide and fish wherever it's fishable before the boat traffic picks up.
Back home yesterday morning I put the boat in the North River around 5:00 AM and found stripers sporadically breaking and terns dropping on bait. Drifted down along Rivermoor casting at the shore and picked up 2 fish in fairly short order. I had visions of monster fish out by Humarock, though, so I kept drifting out toward the ocean. At the mouth I yakked with a shorebound flyfisherman who said that all the breaking fish were shad (I told him about the stripers upriver), and sure enough as I drifted out dozens of silvery blue shad rocketed clear of the water for the sheer damn hell of it. I anchored off the biggest rock outside of Humarock and cast at it and then in all directions and failed to move, see or otherwise detect a cow bass or a schoolie. I went back upriver for another drift or two. With the sun up there were other boats afoot and there were no more visibly feeding stripers, but I picked up a couple and took some pictures and then caught a shad (which was not large n
or particularly hard-fighting but which did go airborne a coupla times). And then I had to go home.