Fishing the Shallowwater Flats of Duxbury Bay, Massachusetts

Above: A Google Earth overview of Plymouth and Duxbury Bays, including their respective barrier beaches and sprawling sand flats interlaced with tidal channels, guzzles, and embayments.

Duxbury Bay, on the South Shore of Massachusetts, can be an especially rewarding and exciting place to fish if you enjoy flats- and sightfishing. When the tide drops (80% of its billions of gallons of water drains on each tide), the bay's sprawling sandbars become interlaced with channels that average a foot or two deep. Clotted with baitfish, the channels often fill with striped bass that take advantage of the bait's entrapment. In the words of one local angler, the fishing can get pretty stupid here during the fall run between late September and late October.

One of the more effective ways to fish the bay is to head there at low tide. Pull your kayak or jonboat out on a flat such as Captain's, wade into the shallows, and sightfish. Tie yoiur boat's bow painter around your waist and follow the schools on foot. Fishing like this can be a nice change from passively sitting around on your butt all day towing a trolled tube.

Alternatively, on an outgoing tide, beach your kayak at the mouth of any of the dozens of guzzles on the edges of the flats where the flats lie adjacent to deepwater channels. As the guzzles spew bait, large stripers nose around at the guzzles' mouths. Cast a shad-and-jighead, Hopkins or Kastmaster or Roberts and, WHAM! Likely a 28"-plus keeper.

Fishing Duxbury at low tide requires some stamina: reaching some of the more productive flats (Captains, the east side of Clarks Island, the Jones River mouth out by the Cowyard) can require up to half an hour of paddling.

Just be alert when fishing the flats on a rising tide. If your kayak or jonboat is beached on a sandbar somewhere, the rising waters will quickly float it off and ferry it into deep water you'll have to swim across to retrieve your boat. Likewise, some of the tidal streams, particularly those at the head of Captains Flat and near the Cowyard and the Bug Light, run hard enough to overwhelm the inexperienced.

To zoom in and out of the images and to read notes on the bays' access points and its marked and unmarked channels and offshore sandbars that become temporary beaches, you'll need to download Sea Kayak Dot Net's kmz file (free, no registration required) from the Google Earth BBS. Download the Google Earth application and you'll be able to manipulate your views of the image.

Below: a bird's eye view of the two bays marked with their various put-ins and other information. This is a simple jpg image of the highly interactive Google Earth BBS file mentioned above. As with the image above, you can click on this jpg to enlarge it and read the titles of the put-in notes. But that's about it. To really get down to business you need to download the file.

Below: a sample of the kmz file's drop-down window with a related note about Browns Bank, a vast offshore sand bar fine to land on at low tide on a summer day and a challenging area to paddle when the sea is rough.

Again, this is a jpg file, not a kmz. If you want to zoom in and out of the image and read the drop-down notes, you'll need to download the kmz file from the Google Earth BBS. Otherwise, double-click to enlarge.

Below: a jpg of the Google Earth map version of the kmz file. Again, you can click on the jpg to enlarge it. But to interact with the file, you need to download it from the Google Earth BBS and open it with Google Earth.

Meanwhile, to read about fishing not-to0-distant Gloucester harbor's inner harbor, try North American Kayak Fishing.

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