North Coast Angler
2006 Fishing Reports

May 22, 2006
With all the flood water to contend with in our area, all of my fishing last week was confined to our Cape. The Little River mud flat produced excellent numbers of stripers from mid week through today.

I had excellent success on last Thursday’s outgoing tide. I fished flies on the mud flat and landed quite a few quality fish, one or two up to 25”. I am pleasantly surprised by the solid numbers of fish as well as the several year classes mixed together. All this bodes well for the summer fishing to remain solid. Steve Papows and I enjoyed some quality fishing last Friday afternoon, fishing from the grass point behind Nichols on the tide top. We were throwing all sorts of hard baits including Fiord spoons, jumpin’ minnows, small poppers and soft baits. Most of the fish were 16-20”.

This morning I decided to get an hour or so of fishing in at the mud flat. Even with the howling NW wind, I managed more than a dozen stripers on the fly. But I was out done by a couple guys anchored up in the channel fishing flounder. The flounder in the photo was rather large, ~ 5 pounds, the biggest one I’ve seen in awhile.

The ocean side fishing is on track, I have had reports of good numbers of fish being caught at Pebble and in Gloucester harbor. Some fish in the keeper size range are now starting to show.

The Merrimack River is slowly returning to normal flow and color. I expect the fishing to quickly get good and expect to start getting some reports of fish numbers and quality by the end of this week. I have heard reports that the Shad are present in the river, but the river is still running much too hard to fish effectively.

I hope to have more info on the state of the Merrimack in next weeks report.

Captain Skip Montello

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