This is the week, peeps. Listen, I know the fishing has been very hit or miss so far this season. But the new moon will continue bringing new schools of large stripers into our waters. It’s just about where they’ll show up.

While I don’t want to contribute to the zoo that has been the Big Ditch this week, I’m hearing that some big fish moved in this morning and provided an hour or two of nice topwater action. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard the same thing. So I’m taking this as a sign of things to come. If this wind ever lays down, we could see an awesome boat bite in CC Bay in time for Father’s Day.

Report: Sporty seas and missing mackerel

I got to take Paulo and Ruben, two wildcard anglers from Italy, out this morning to try and get their first keeper striped bass.

With the wind forecast far from ideal for heading really anywhere in the Bay, we made the decision to hang around Plymouth Bay to see if we could find any topwater action (we did not).

First move was to find the mackerel. These guys have been strangely missing for the past week or so. But we had a slack low tide at 6am, so we decided to try our luck. After a half hour of an empty sonar and emptier sabiki rigs, we gave up.

Back in the Bay, the wind picked up even more, but we fought through the chop and landed 10 or 12 schoolies, mostly on SP Minnows.

Unfortunately, I could not find any bigger fish for my new Italian buds, but it was a great morning nonetheless. I promised a 25-pounder for Paolo, but he wisely made the point that if we added all of the fish that we caught together, it would have been close to 25-pounds.

At the dock, we enjoyed a few Mayflower IPAs and talked about my planned trip to Italy in the future to target beautiful marble trout and massive wels catfish.

Forecast: High Hook Striper Tournament

Saturday morning, the Mitchell brothers and Capt. Bill will set out into Cape Cod Bay to hopefully catch a monster to win the High Hook Striper Tournament. We need lines in the water at 4am, so I hope everyone triple sets their alarms and gets ready for a long day of fishing. I’m setting 10pm, no beer curfew for Friday night.

It might be a three sandwich per person type of day.

I have zero hope that the mackerel show back up in Plymouth, so, if the wind forecast remains the same, we’ll head across the Race Point to load up the livewell and drift the potline by the Bathhouse and Herring Cover for cruising stripers.

Any topwater action like we experienced last week will be butter. The west wind and outgoing tide should be a recipe for a hot bite, so we may head around the backside and cruise as far as the Golf Ball to find that bite.

Another intriguing spot is the East End of the Canal. The reports of big fish feeding on herring has me very interested in fishing the East End jetty out to Scorton. The fish always seem to make a hard right turn and head straight for that ledge at a certain point in the season. If the mackerel fail to show, will they make that turn early? I think they may.

This hard west wind and new moon tides today through to Saturday morning should serve to shake things up. I think at some point, we’ll get a second act of mackerel and herring, and I think we’re going to see reports of a few 40s this weekend. Sunday looks calm, so it’ll be a great day to burn some gas and cruise around looking for surface frenzies. Docs, Guppys, Hogy Pro- Tails, and Bill Hurley Sand Eels have been hot lures so far for this type of fishing.

That’ll do it for this week, ladies and gents. Will the mackerel show back up? Will the 40 pounders show up at Race Point, the Backside, or East End on the new moon tide? Will Capt. Bill eat his Italian sub before 6am on Saturday? Find out next week–same time, same channel.