| May 21, 2007 |
| The striper fishing over this past week has been somewhat hit or miss on Cape Ann. Candy House flat was very good early in the week but slacked off at the close of the week. The heavy rains, coolish temperatures and large tides (colder water in the estuaries) no doubt played a role. The ocean side water temp is still running a few degrees colder than average for this time of spring. On the other hand, the striper action up the coast in the Merrimack was very good at the end of the week. Joey Calcavecchia of Saltwater Custom Flies reported having an outstanding day last Friday, boating more than 30 stripers with several fish between 25 and 31 inches. The Merrimack River estuary temperatures are running in the low 60’s on the falling tide…ideal for feeding stripers. The shad fishing continues to be a mystery.Some fish are being taken at the Lawrence dam…but far fewer than expected. We will continue looking into the reason for the small run.
Chuck McCarthy went offshore last Monday in search of ground fish and had a great day, his report; I fished with my good friend Dave Melchionda on his beautiful new Mako out of East Gloucester, we started out at Saturday Night Ledge and found plenty of short cod, 12"-22", mostly on clam rigs as it is a difficult place to fish jigs there due to bottom debris...around mid morning we made our way out to the humps (approx 140-160 feet) several miles NE of Thatcher Island and found huge numbers of cod, mostly short, some as small as 8" (hopefully a good sign for the future) but in the course of wrestling with several dozen of these shorts we did manage to take several that broke the 24" limit along with a couple of nice haddock, wolffish and cusk....also lost something VERY big about halfway up right near the end of the day...we also ran across some huge pods of small pollack in 60-80 feet of water...the only down side was the season's first dogfish (just one but still depressing)....most of the fish were caught on 14 ounce Norwegian jigs with double pink shrimp teasers.  
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