Massachusetts Striped Bass Fishing: Great Brewster Island, Boston Harbor

Striped bass fishermen looking for good-sized keepers 28"-plus in waters close to structure deep and shallow, roiled with whitewater swell and subject to good current, do well to fish outer Boston Harbor's Great Brewster Island. A rocky reef runs east from the island to nearby Middle Brewster; to the southwest a sandspit, nearly a mile long, runs from the island along muddy bottom to a deep channel dropoff. During the fall, fish this area and you can't help but notice the visual enticement: the clarity of the water, the variety of structure, the width of the mussel beds and flats that surround Great Brewster.

Along Great Brewster Island's southwestern shores, where the sandspit snakes off toward Georges Island, the angler will often, during the fall run, cruise past large feeding schools of two or three-year old striped bass in their characteristic sipping mode, pulling in copepods and shrimp larvae. The fish fixate, engage in behavior a striped bass fisherman can't help but watch with wonder.

Slowly swimming near the surface in thick, dense schools, each striped bass feeds so close to its neighbor that between each fish lies little more than the swing of a tail, perhaps less. The fish frequently bump into one another.

This is known to some as can't-be-caught mode: as the schooled striped bass feed close to the surface on layers of freshly hatched larvae, they make a distinct lapping sound.

Massachusetts striped bass fishermen, whether kayak fishing or otherwise, who encounter this behavior for the first time, usually during the early days of September, after the summer doldrums and when expectations of an easy catch are high, can't help but be mystified. Striped bass feeding thus almost never strike a lure.

Late-fall massings of striped bass on the surface in Massachusetts, from Gloucester to Manchester to BostonHarbor to Duxbury Bay and waters south, when stripers feed on free-floating larvae, are an exercise in frustration, and the case is the same off Brewster Island as it is anywhere else. The fish are plentiful, close, packed into surface-rippling schools that thicken the top of the water column. Rather than slap and thrash and twist on the water, they bob. The schools move more slowly than the frenzied schools later in season or earlier in the spring run.

The key is to ignore these schools and move further offshore of the island, away from the sandspit and Flying Point, and take a more methodical, run-of-the-mill approach. Rather than reach for surface poppers and Kastmasters or other topwater column soft plastics, resort to the tube-and-worm, the bucktail jig, the whole herring on a bare hook and concentrate your efforts on the waters along Great Brewster's north and western shores.

The water here is deeper, faster moving, colder, and with a rough and structured bottom. While the surfaced schools on and near the shallows are more provocative, they are all, to a fish, undersized schoolies. Marvel at their behavior a while, then do deep with live or dead baits, get to work, and fish with purpose rather than in earnest.

Keywords for this story are striped bass, kayak fishing, Boston Harbor striper fishing, Great Brewster Island Boston Harbor, Massachusetts saltwater fishing