Autumn Days in the Bay

Tom Keer

B & C Beck

(page 1 of 2)

Whenever folks ask me where I live, I adopt my best body-builder pose, arm curled tight, and point just below my wrist on the inside of my forearm. My anatomical reference is to Wellfleet, on outer Cape Cod. Everyone laughs, but the biggest cackles come from Michiganders because they know what it’s like to chart geography on a body part. (Michigan is known as the Mitten because of its resemblance to the hand shoe.) But, then again, they may just find humor in the fact that I need to hit the gym and grunt out a few hundred more bicep curls.But no gym time for me now because it’s fall on the Cape and that’s fishing time. Vacation crowds leave in droves around Labor Day, and we anglers have the entire sandbar to ourselves. There are few vehicles waiting at red lights and beach parking lots are virtually empty (and non-permit parking is generally allowed). Vehicles with bike racks disappear and are replaced by rigs with rod racks. By Columbus Day, the restaurants are closed, and it becomes increasingly difficult to get a cup of coffee or some junk food to chow on in between midnight fishing trips.

You’ll see old pick-ups with pop-up campers running the beaches at Race Point, or Jeeps and SUVs rolling down Sandy Neck to access Barnstable Harbor. There are no 4-by-4s along the Cape Cod Canal, just women’s bikes. There are fleets of them, ridden by tougher-than-nails old men. Just ask one why a woman’s bike. “I can’t get my leg and waders over the bar on a man’s bike,” they’ll say. Their bikes have rod racks, too, and many of those two-wheelers have baskets so big they’d make Dorothy and Toto green with envy.

Autumn on the Cape is about boats, too. Long, deep-vee hulls with twin outboards capable of timely runs in heavy seas in search of giant schools of bass crashing the surface. One fall I saw a 26-foot Regulator launching with twin 250s in the stern. I wasn’t on that boat, but hell—at $5 a gallon on the gas dock, I couldn’t even afford the fuel for a trip like that, let alone the boat.

There are skiffs and kayaks as well, perfect for working the offshore bars, flats and tidal seams. Getting into skinny water and working a pod of small bass is more fun to me than casting into a blitz of big fish. Sure I like big fish, but there isn’t much that is more exciting than hooking a striper in a foot of water that is not much farther away than your rod tip. A slob at that same distance is what dreams are made of.

There are all sizes of fish. Next to the spring, when the big fish are feeding on herring, the fall is a solid bet for a shot at a big striper on Cape Cod. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking bass or blues, they’re fat and they want to get fatter. The schoolies and the pesky 3- to 4-pound cocktail blues get transplanted by the double-digit fish. A 12- to 14-pound bluefish in skinny water marks a successful fly-rodding day, in my book.

Ask Jim Anker. We were out one September day. The wind was a perfect woodcock wind, 10 to 15 knots northwest. We saw a few blues here and there on the dropping tide, the kind of fish that catch your attention but really don’t make your heart race. We waited as the tide dropped to slack low, and set up where a sand spit adjoins a giant flat. The pattern had been that, when the tide turned, the fish moved up along the sand spit until they hit a guzzle, about a foot deeper than the rest of the bottom. Then, they passed through and got onto the flat. No need for an anchor: I trimmed down the motor until the skeg stuck into the sand.