Block Island’s Early Summer Bass
Early Summer offers a buffet of bass fishing at Rhode Island’s foremost striper stronghold.
Pictured above: You might have to wait for your best shot at a 50, but June sees plenty of specimens in the 15- to 30-pound range.
Early Summer offers a buffet of bass fishing at Rhode Island’s foremost striper stronghold.
I shoot a quick glance up at the bridge to see Capt. Andy Dangelo’s “keep going” gesture, then whip my head around so as not to lose the small shell squid’s place in the glare astern. After a sodden morning snapping parachute jigs in long loops around the North Rip, the last of a three-day June easterly system is moving on. The sky holds the appearance of a particularly dramatic Hudson River School oil painting—a deep-gray expanse to east’ard up against an explosion of sun and piercing blue sky in the west, the light source changing by the second as the sun dashes through oncoming fair-weather clouds.
On the water’s surface, a second transition is underway. As Dangelo kicks the Maridee II’s engines out of gear, maintaining our position a stone’s throw upstream of the Rip’s standing waves, our charter’s ecstatic to finally be standing on a calm deck. It was piping when we arrived just before 6 a.m., and had we not stuck double-headers on our first two passes through the middle rip, we’d probably have kept steaming south, down to the corner. Fishing what it was, we elected to trade a semi-beating for near-fish-a-pass action. Still, short, steep seas and the constant jostling and slamming tax patience over a period of hours. Now we’ll get our reward for persistence.
Stripers slash and dart along the face of the rip—a tail-slap here, an airborne 15-pounder there—presumably chasing big sand eels or squid right along the seam. The trouble I’m having is tracking the squid lure’s position through the bright water. I bump the lever drag into gear, lift the rod tip skyward and begin pumping the rod to get the bait dancing topside. I locate the small pink shape just ahead of the seam where calm water abruptly stands straight up. A millisecond later, a four-foot circle of water around the lure erupts, and I nearly jump out of my deck boots. In the same second I note the lure is still chugging along—that the fish has obviously missed—a violent tail-slap just behind the squid. Regaining composure, I remember to pass the rod off to one of the guys in the charter.
Before I can reach for the second rod, chaos ensues. I look astern just in time to see another kiddie-pool-sized boil beneath the slashing squid. Before the guy on the rod knows what’s hit him, the light e-glass conventional stick doubles up and I instinctively reach down to prevent him from “adjusting” the drag. The heavy Gorilla braid hisses off through the guides, appears to actually be accelerating as the bass rockets down-tide, leveraging a current that’s pushing three knots.
“Get that other one out!” shouts Dangelo from behind me. “And let me know what’s going on.”
I send a second rigged shell squid back, keeping a close watch on the other line. A good fish that knows how to use the tide can cause problems, and I note that, while the run has slowed, roughly half the spool is bare. “We might have to go get this one, Drew,” I holler over my shoulder.
“Guess you might as well wind that one up, then,” he responds, as we continue to slide north toward Sandy Point along the boiling rip-face. I gather the captain wants to move off the prime zone before he runs down into the rough water—not wanting to risk spooking the countless fish still tearing up the tide-delivered bait bonanza.
Soon our angler has gotten control of his fish, and as we pitch and roll in the roiled water, he gains line slowly. Like heavier fish everywhere, this old girl has bee-lined for the bottom, and it’s almost five minutes before I get my first glimpse of deep color. She’ll be the fish of the day if we can close the deal. After two more desperation runs, she rolls up topside, and as Dangelo kicks the port engine gently, she comes alongside and I guide her into the massive landing net. “Good fish,” I mutter as I heave the bag into the cockpit with a thud. She’s not super-long, but she’s built like a tank—35 pounds, maybe north of that. You’ve got to love June at Block Island.
Big Fish and Otherwise
If you ask any of the big-fish specialists about timing in their hunt for the big girls—the really big girls, 50 on up—few of them will talk much about June. “We always used July 20 as the guideline,” says Capt. Andy Dangelo. “That was always the time when we could reliably start to expect big fish in semi-reliable numbers.” Still, somehow amid all the 50-pounder headlines this last decade, the more casual segments of the angling public have merged the entire season into one big parade of behemoths.
That’s not to say you won’t stick some trophy linesides in June. Quite a few seasons—and I suspect it relates partly to where the moons fall in the sixth and seventh months—I’ve recorded veritable blitzes of slob stripers around the second June moon (particularly when it falls late in the month). Dangelo himself has landed clients untold numbers of 40-plus-pound bass and a handful over 50 in June. But on the balance, and there are a number of theories on this, if you’re hell-bent on heavies, you should fish with a will from the second half of July into September. For my part, I’ll take June, and you can have the desperate insomnia of monster hunting.
The Other Migration
When most folks think “migration” fishing, their brains cue up dramatic scenes of acre-wide blitzes and birds thick enough overhead to blot out the sun. They think fall—October, November, the first innings in December. But June is migration fishing, too—it’s just that the visual component to the whole drama is scaled back quite a bit. At Block Island, it’s this first migratory rush of bass—call it mid-May through the waning stages of June—that sets off some of each season’s most lights-out, lock-and-load fishing. The best part is that anything can happen: after two straight weeks last June drilling on fish mostly in the 27- to 34-inch range, we hit one day when everything we stuck scaled from 25 pounds on up, with the largest in the low 40s. Fish are on the move, they’re schooled up in sometimes staggering numbers, and they’re on a singular quest to pork up after their eastward ocean travel.
What that means in terms of the fishery is that June is probably the month with the greatest diversity of bass fishing opportunities. Since water temps are still generally civilized, the bass have yet to hunker down into that slow-and-low pattern that dictates specialized strategy—dragging wire line, eeling, yo-yoing, fishing the graveyard shift—from July onward.
More times than I can count, we’ve rounded the inside can at Southwest Point on a dim June morning and found bass from schoolie size to slammers slashing and rolling all over the surface from the corner eastward to the Thumb and Black Rock. Capt. Al Anderson of the Snug Harbor-based Prowler has recounted dozens of tales of wide-open plugging sessions in the rip that sets up just inside the can at Southwest Point, particularly on mornings with an assertive SW breeze running into a good push of ebbing tide on that corner. He and others have also enjoyed some career-high scores slinging Danny plugs and an array of other offers into the wash over the reef that just out from Old Harbor Point on the east side.
Other times—again, usually on low-light mornings—you’ll be trolling through an apparently dead ocean as the tide eases off when suddenly the fish are all over the surface, thinner-than-November birds working the situation.
Blitz Conditions
As is the case at any point in the season, anytime there’s a bit of a sea on, or a strong tide bucking the wind, the resulting washing-machine conditions and whitewater tend to pull fish from all points on the Ledge in tight to the Island. Plugging, slinging eels, dragging tubes or even flies on leadcore—it all works at some point in month six.
On June trips, I’ve taken fish from schoolie size into the 30-pound class on a wide array of methods—parachutes jigs on wire, flies, plugs (big pencil poppers one morning fairly tight to shore at the Thumb off Lewis Farm on the south side), big rubber snakes, eels, live scup, various plastics cast at breaking fish, and so on. It’s not a monster fishery most years, but June will give you a whole spread of options, and often let you stick fish by whatever means you most enjoy.
Add to that variety the chance to launch a (relatively) new year’s fishing against one of the region’s most memorable backdrops, whether the towering south-side bluffs, the sometimes volatile North Rip snaking its way offshore from Sandy Point and North Light just beyond, or adrift within bell-shot of the 1BI.
Sure, there’s a lot to be said for those balmy August nights with two 40-pounders in the box and a few others north of the 30-pound mark already granted their liberty—a dozen lively eels still writhing in the bucket. But for my money—especially with the dark months of winter still in recent memory—I’ll take the month of June with all its healing promise, all its surprises, and its occasionally mind-boggling stacks of migration-hungry linesides. If you’ve been nursing along a quiet need to launch your season in earnest with an absolute bail job of bass—and won’t be too offended by sunrise over the south-side bluffs, make it a point to get there soon.
1 thought on “Block Island’s Early Summer Bass”
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Lafayette MCcaskill very informational for I am from Newjersey,very avid reader,but keep it basic,with not so much to moods and Enviormet,but location,tchniques and specifc,Dates…
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