Kayak Fishing Massachusetts: Milk Island Off Rockport

Hello there fellow fishermen and sea kayakers. I'm Adam Bolonsky. I live in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the northeast coast of the US one hour north of Boston. I'm a kayak fisherman and writer.

When I'm not fishing the waters of Cape Ann during striped bass and bluefish season, I'm often underwater, examining the waters I fish. Not for any reason in particular except that the colors and textures of the nearshore ocean bottom are an unusual world rather unlike what's above it.

For those of you who don't know, bluefish are an aggressive migratory fish that travel and feed in large schools. They have a wholly-undeserved reputation for oiliness. It's too bad so many guys - fishermen, mostly who would rather target the more glamorous striped bass - continue to spread the false rumor. The problem must have started after one diner too many ate bluefish that had spoiled. They turned their noses up and wrote the fish off, helping spread the tall tale that bluefish are inedible. And now it's become fashionable to dismiss bluefish.

Too bad for everyone. If you haven't eaten fresh bluefish, you don't know what you're missing. Well, they are inedible after four days, just as any fish is, and even after just a day or two if they are not well-taken care of after capture. They are on the one hand a fish lovely to look at -- their distinct sky blue tint, their large yellow eyes with angrily-focused black pupils. And they are on the other hand truly homely son of a guns, with an ugly overbite and downturned mouth that broadcasts decidedly humorless and misanthropic expression.

But they are a good fish to pursue, not only for the most excellent sport of their fight and the challenges of bringing them aboard without getting bitten.

I like to pursue them from a 17 foot long sea kayak rigged as simply as possible. I prefer a closed-deck sea kayak over a short and stubby sit-on-top fishing kayak for the sea kayak's speed and range, and its stability in rough water -- sometimes bluefish have to be chased when they are feeding in a school on the surface, and it's helpful to have a fast boat when they begin ranging and roaming in pursuit of balled-up schools of bait.

Add in a simple spincast reel on a short two piece rod I can break down and store belowdecks, and that I can secure from getting dropped overboard and sinking to the bottom, and I'm pretty much done.

Oh yuh -- and a simple clasp knife too, for bleeding the fish as soon as I land them and for cutting back frayed fishing line to re-attach steel leader and lure.

Here's a lure I've had a lot of good luck with: a broken-back diving and swimming lure, called a broken-back swimmer, with the distinct green and white zebra pattern of mackerel and two treble hooks. Truth to be told, though, it's more this lure's swimming action when trolled, at 10 to 12 feet, than its color which makes it effective. It's the bluefish's habit to strike whatever it detects in the water column, regardless of the color.

A migratory fish like this has to be indiscriminate and opportunistic Just imagine how quickly you'd starve if the only color foods you ate were green peppers and, come fall, you migrated each year to a region of the world where all the food was red. I like this lure and others like it for a bunch of reasons.

They're heavy enough to cast from a kayak to set up for trolling twenty or thirty yards off the stern. And they float, so if I lose one to broken or frayed line, there's a good chance I can pluck it from the water if I keep an eye it. And just as important if not more, they're often free --- at the tail end of the fall fishing season here in New England, plenty of these floating lures wash up on the shorelines of our east-facing beaches.

I'll beachcomb the sands and the high tide line for lost lures as the dreary days of fall begins its long and ponderous push of a New England winter into our lives and psyches, and dumps many feet of snow onto our roads, highways, driveways and woods. I also paddle and fish in summer without a pfd, also known as a lifejacket, which gives me ample opportunity to enjoy the weather here.

I don't do this because I'm dumb, but because I enjoy the freedom of movement. I do keep my pfd handy, though, in case I'm approached by the local harbormaster or the occasional Coast Guard patrol out on routine safety inspections.

Well, here we go. I'm trying to land a bluefish right here - that I trolled up from about 12 feet of water as I was trolling a broken-back lure a couple dozen yards off my stern in water a hundred yards or so west of a low rocky island a half mile off Rockport, Massachusetts. As you can see, the water was remarkably calm: one of those still, hot and humid days, no wind to speak of, that grip August afternoons off Massachusetts in a hypnotizing doldrums, the hazy horizon the same hue of the water.

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