What’s Biting in May in Massachusetts?
South Shore
By Billy Mitchell
Look to the Flats for Early Stripers
May has not been the shotgun start we’ve grown accustomed to over the past few years. The peak of fishing is certainly here—hungry stripers, fresh from their journey north, crashing bait under screeching terns for entire tide cycles—but the downtimes are frequent and concerning. May used to feature great fishing all month long, but the bite has ebbed and flowed in recent years, even when conditions line up perfectly. It simply comes down to the biomass of school-size to small keeper-size fish, or the lack thereof. What we’ve found, which is typical along the striper coast, are larger fish mixing in with the school-size fish of spring.
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You can get lucky and find fish in open water or along the beachfronts in May, but the majority of the action will be along sand and eelgrass flats inside South Shore bays and rivers. I like the few hours on either side of low tide in Plymouth, Duxbury, and Kingston bays, especially if the water is starting to move heavily around daybreak. At low slack, I look to the terns to advise where the congregations of bait are holding. Often, bigger fish are on the prowl in shallow water before the “spring blitz” begins. Throwing a dark-colored soft plastic, like a GT Eel, on a weightless hook often gets big fish to eat.
As the sun rises, look for newly migrated terns to show you exactly where you should be fishing. At low tides, the stripers push bait onto the flats in under a foot of water—my absolute favorite conditions to fish. Small spook-style plugs, like the Heddon Zara Spook and Rebel Jumpin’ Minnow, get the stripers’ attention when they’re chasing small bait. Weightless soft plastics with smaller profiles, like Albie Snax and Fin-S Fish, are great options when worked slowly. They often draw out larger fish from the pack.
As the tide rises, move to deeper channels surrounding the flats, and slowly jig and reel a JoeBaggs Patriot Fish or Hogy ProTail, dragging it along the bottom as you drift. This is often the cure once the terns disperse and you are marking fish deep.
In May, stripers are much less structure-reliant than later in the season. Yes, I fish soft structure that acts as bait corrals with the movement of the tide, but the stripers won’t often stick there at this point in the season. The strategy is to move quickly and quietly to where you think the bait is going once the blitz action has subsided, using subtle clues given by the terns and gulls. Often, you can intercept the start of a blitz by following a handful of wheeling terns.
I can’t mention May stripers these days without using the word “finicky.” They are interesting creatures and I think we underestimate just how moody they can sometimes be. However, if you swam hundreds of miles up the coast, battling predators and cold temperatures, you’d probably want to sit out a few tides, too. Stripers can often be seen sunning themselves or swimming slowly over muddy bottoms, either warming up or digesting their forage. The switch sometimes flips, but it often takes a few tides before the feeding begins again.
Even in all-out blitz conditions, with the primary forage being small silversides and squid, stripers “trout-sipping” on the surface has become the norm. Small flies, like a Ray’s fly or a single-feather flatwing, fished on an intermediate line and stripped slowly, is often the antidote, though weightless soft plastics can have this same effect. The neutral buoyancy of these options, fished slowly and naturally, seem to make the picky fish want to eat more than a loud popper or a chaotic swimming plug.
I foresee that the bigger tides around the full and new moons, occurring on May 12 and 26 this year, will surely be days to expect great topwater action. The early moon looks especially promising, with big tides and moving water around dawn throughout its cycle. Circle those dates on your calendar and get your PTO requests in now.
Pressure systems and weather are incredibly important factors to consider in May, almost more so than any other time of year. As mentioned, these fish have traveled a long way, and unless you’re catching them just as they enter the bay, they’ve probably had their fair share of silversides and small squid. A high-pressure system, wind, and sunny skies are a death knell for any type of big spring bite. Instead, look for a dropping pressure system with wind from the west or south. I have always gone by the adage that west is best, especially when fishing inshore locales on our side of Cape Cod Bay, because any combination of north or east wind will turn the bite off. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but at this point, I’ve got enough anecdotal memory to stay in bed if I see a northeast wind forecast for the morning.
Greater Boston Area
By Ron Powers
Fool for the City!
We may not have the sand dunes and windswept shorelines of the Cape nor the rocky promontories and gin-clear water of the North Shore, but the harbor holds a lot of striped bass! This is the month when schoolies, slots, and maybe even a few cows come cruising into town and almost everything else seems secondary.
In the past, I’ve succumbed to the Cape Cod compulsion. For many years, I was more a rock-climber than an angler due to a preoccupation with the comber-kissed shorelines of the North Shore, but it’s the grit of the big city that keeps calling me back for more. If you painted the perfect picture of a striper-attracting environment, you’d begin with structure and then add a dash of moving water as well as a diversified bait source. If that description conjures up images of Boston Harbor to you, then you get my drift.
The thrill of three-waying an eel within view of Boston Light or watching in awe as a big bass belts a bunker in the shadows of the skyline never grows old. Of course, it’s not the aesthetics that will attract stripers this month—the nearly three-dozen islands, rivers rife with herring runs and a plethora of prey species such as mackerel, sea herring, harbor pollock, and silversides—have a bit to do with that.
It may seem counterintuitive, but I’m hoping that my first fish of the year is a feisty 20-inch schoolie as opposed to something more likely to test my tackle. Recent trends in coastwise recruitment of striped bass are alarmingly low, which is disheartening for the future of the stock. While in the past, I was borderline euphoric when my first fish pulled drag, this year I’d like nothing better than to see swarms of scrappy two- and three-year olds making their first trip northward. Boaters will be reveling in chasing topwater feeds between Hingham Harbor and Quincy Bay, with the swath between Peddock Island and Wollaston Beach especially productive. Nearby shorelines such as Hull Gut and the Black Creek section of Wollaston Beach should be prime for surfcasters chunking or casting all manner of lures.
Piers are always good options for landlubbers, with those off Nut Island, Castle Island, Deer Island, Seven Draw Park, and Lynn Harbor all putting the shore-bound angler just a cast away from catching bass.
If you’re a college kid or anyone lacking the convenience of a car, then Boston is custom-made for you. Public transportation and the increasing access to harbor hot spots will put you in the game. One “park” that is very interesting is the Boston Harbor Walk, which is a near-continuous 43-mile linear park stretching from the Neponset River in Dorchester to Constitution Beach (Shea’s Beach to residents). I know both of those areas intimately. The Neponset River is one of the earlier shore spots for stripers and Shea’s Beach is an early harbor spot for encountering a pogy/bass/blue massacre. Should you have a bike or even a scooter at the ready, you can cover a lot of ground along the Harbor Walk while looking for surface feeds … they should not be unusual this month.
Then, there are the nighttime ninjas who prefer their striped bass between dusk and dawn regardless of the time of the year. Shore sharpies will do well by tossing bucktails, soft-plastic stickbaits, metal lips, and Finnish-style swimmers off Point Allerton, Wollaston Beach, Winthrop Beach, and Revere Beach. In addition to sampling the surf by the end of the month, I’ll be hoping for that first ‘sleigh ride” while aboard my Hobie Revo 13 as I target herring runs. By the way, there is good news regarding those as we may soon have another thriving run in our midst.
In addition to the Weymouth Back River, Charles River, and Mystic Rivers, we likely will be adding the Weymouth Fore River to that list. For years, spillover alewives/blueback herring from the Back River attempted to repopulate the long-dormant Fore River run, but they could not surmount the two upstream dams. However, change is on the way as federal, state, and city partners are in the process of removing those dams, which will free up miles of spawning habitat. Other species will benefit from this effort as well, especially smelt and eels. In fact, while this process was underway in March, thousands of smelt were observed and helped along upstream to spawn.
As hopeful as I am to hear of mixed-year classes of stripers this May, I’m also interested in the fate of flounder. For many, the harbor just doesn’t feel the same without a healthy flounder population. The trend in recent years has been alarming, with numbers trending in the wrong direction. The result has been that few are even bothering to fish for Boston blackbacks. Emblematic of the fate of our flounder was my friend, Jason Colby’s, painful decision to move his boat from Quincy to Cape Cod Bay so he could more reliably find flounder. To the skipper’s credit, he held onto Quincy Bay until he could no longer consistently put his charters into fish. If ever there was an indicator that our winter flounder are in trouble, this is it.
That said, I’m cautiously optimistic that the trend is reversing. In 2023, a few other charter captains, such as Captain Brian Coombs of Get Tight Sportfishing as well as his sidekick Captain Anthony Forte, stepped up and attempted to fill the void for patrons who wanted a flounder fix. And a fix is exactly what they got, according to Brian, since both captains limited out more often than not. Every bit as encouraging was the “where,” with Broad Sound, Lynn Harbor, and Swampscott Harbor delivering bites that rivaled established spots such as Portuguese Cove, Rainsford Island, Hospital Shoals, and Deer Island Flats.
Ironically, during one of my trips aboard Captain Colby’s boat out of Cape Cod, I later learned that a friend was matching me flounder for flounder off Fisherman’s Beach in Swampscott, and he was fishing from a kayak. The pier at this beach, as well as the Lynn Harbor and Lynn Heritage Park piers, are good options for shore success.
As great as May is for the rest of New England, Greater Bostonians just might have it even better. Flounder fishing and the arrival of striped bass is certainly one part of it, but it’s the equal access to all that makes the harbor extra special.
North Shore
By Steve Gallant
A Tale of Two Basses
Things are starting to turn green, the weather is warming, and it feels like everything is coming alive. While some folks may be excited to get back into their gardens, anglers are champing at the bit to get back to chasing their favorite seven-striped fish. Yes, this is the month that saltwater anglers here on the North Shore dream about all winter. Although we normally associate the start of the striper season with small “schoolie” bass, there has been an early influx of large fish in recent years. In fact, I tangled with bass up to 40 pounds in local estuaries before the calendar had even hit June.
May is one of my favorite months to be a surfcaster. Every tide brings the possibility of another wave of fresh fish, the weather is still cool, the bugs aren’t out yet, and I get to chase fish in some of my favorite environments: marshes and rivers. Of course, you can also target them along beachfronts or in the rocks; however, I think they don’t stay in these places very long and are just passing through in search of a place with warmer water and abundant bait.
Speaking of water, it is pretty chilly this time of year, which you will notice when you go for your first wade of the spring. The temperature is usually somewhere in the low to mid-50s during the first half of the month, which affects fish behavior and how you should approach them. First off, I look for the warmest water in a given area. If it’s a really sunny, warm day, I shoot for the outgoing tide in an estuary because the water has had all day to warm up in shallow marshes and bass may be much more active.
Additionally, I try to find an estuary that’s close to mud flats because they are almost always a darker color than the rest of the surrounding sand and absorb a lot more sunlight and warmth on a nice day. Google Earth can be really helpful for scouting and getting a good idea of the bottom composition from images taken at low tide. Almost all of the tidal rivers around the North Shore have varying numbers and sizes of bass this month. Some of the more prolific ones include the Merrimack, Parker, Essex, Ipswich, Annisquam, and Danvers. All of these feature marshes and flats of different types. However, they are very sandy and channels can shift from year to year, so exercise caution when navigating or wading them.
Last year, we had some herring in a couple local estuaries, which I believe contributed to the early arrival of some larger-than-normal bass in May. On a couple of quiet evenings, I encountered what looked like nervous water and the tops of fins just breaking the surface. These were interrupted by bass crashing through, making for quite the melee—not what I was expecting in early May.
For me, the lure of the month is a soft-plastic paddletail on a jighead. With the water still cold, bass may be hesitant to come up to hit a topwater. I work the entire water column at various speeds in order to really key in on the type of presentation the fish want. I had great success last spring with the new Gravity Tackle paddletail plastics. They are made from such a soft, flexible plastic that I got great action at all speeds, especially a slow crawl near bottom. As far as weights go, it depends on how deep an area I am fishing and how much current is present. I carry a range of sizes from 3/8 to 1 ounce, which cover most estuary applications. Keep your color selections simple. Use natural and light colors during the day and darker colors at night or when the light is low.
And, don’t overlook fresh water this month. May is spawning time for largemouth bass here in the Bay State. Depending on the weather and the body of water you are fishing, they may already be on beds, still getting those last few meals in, or in post-spawn recovery-mode. Look for shallow areas of sand, gravel, or small rocks (they usually don’t make spawning beds in mud). Their beds will stick out like sore thumbs once you know what to look for. They are usually a 2- to 3-foot circle on the bottom that bass create with their tails and mouth by clearing away any sticks, leaves, or other organic matter. Inside the circle are their eggs, which the male protects until they hatch. Females then head into post-spawn recovery mode and will be back on the feed a few days later.
Bass are more willing to hit faster-moving baits this month, so lures like spinnerbaits and topwaters will draw more strikes and help you cover more water quicker. Look for areas of growing vegetation, grass, and upcoming lillypads. The fish should still be quite shallow, so running a shoreline or pounding the bank are great approaches. May is a great month to be out and about with a rod in your hand, no matter which bass you choose to pursue!
Source: https://onthewater.com/whats-biting-in-may-in-massachusetts
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