Things were sure different this week on the fishing front. We saw a lot of strange things going on in our ocean.
We had lights-out bass fishing for a few days, with action shifting to Provincetown, especially the area between Wood End and Race Point. Many limit catches were reported by the local fleet. And a lot of the fish are slot-size, which is always good news for the people who pay to go fishing in hopes of bringing home dinner.
Then a hard Canadian northerly front came through, and everything changed. While we do anticipate these northerly fronts to cool our water a bit, what happened caught us by surprise because the chill was so extreme: our water temperatures dropped as much as 25 degrees in some places.
Well, we thought, it’ll bounce back tomorrow like it always does. But it didn’t. Instead, it got colder. We saw readings as low as 44 degrees off the backside ocean beaches and 48 degrees around Race Point. And not only was the water cold, but it was also an entirely different color than it ought to be in summer. Instead of the blue-green we typically see at this time of year, it was greenish gray.
Of course, I have a theory about this. I think the cold was the result of a shift in the Labrador Current. Cape Cod sits between the very cold Labrador Current, which flows from the Arctic Ocean south and cools the waters from Nova Scotia down into Maine and Massachusetts, and the very warm Gulf Stream, which flows up from the Gulf of Mexico and is the dominant current south of here.
The water remained unseasonably cold for four days. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for people who tried to go for a swim. But I can tell you for sure that the fish exited stage left. We couldn’t find signs of bluefish or striped bass anywhere for a couple of days — exhaustive searches turned up nothing.
Then, slowly, the bass started showing up again, first at Billingsgate Shoals, as that part of the bay warmed up before the rest. The good news is that now they are back — and in big numbers. Limit catches were reported again by many of the charter boats, including the CeeJay. Overall, there seem to be more fish in the keeper slot size lately, which makes everyone happy.
But the bluefish are still missing in action for the most part. I’m beginning to wonder if this is going to be a summer without bluefish. Hard to tell, though, because mackerel have been everywhere, particularly in the harbor. One day they literally filled the harbor, end to end.
And that’s not all the wackiness of this past week. Coming in from the backside beaches the other day, I saw a krill patch. Krill is a tiny shrimp-like cold-water sea creature that travels in dense schools; they show as orangey-red patches on the water. I have not seen krill in a very long time. The last time we saw it around here, we also saw a pair of blue whales. Krill is very much a part of their diet.
Then there were the albacore. I saw them busting the surface at Long Point. This is a fish that rarely shows up here. It is mostly seen around the warmer waters of the south Cape and Buzzards Bay.
Captain Nico of Cape Tip’N was reeling in a striped bass at Race Point when a huge great white shark grabbed it from him. This happened a few hundred feet from where people swim.
The theme for this summer is keep your eyes open and expect the unexpected.
