Truro to Provincetown/Wood End

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Adam Bolonsky
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Truro to Provincetown/Wood End

Post by Adam Bolonsky »

It took most of the morning for us hemming and hawing over the northwesterlies forecast this past Sunday for Mark, Karen, and I to finally head down to Pond Village in Truro to take a look at the water. There were ripples and no waves, and the whitecaps that had been spilling all morning off Eastham had lain down. The air was cold and as we unpacked our gear I had to square my shoulders, put on my jacket and hat, and borrow a pair of gloves from Karen to hold off the Reynaud's.

Backstory: Friday night, in heaving chop swell and warm air, Mark and I launched into some brisk and wet southwesterlies off Eastham. We fished all of ten minutes, sailed downwind in the building gusts, then headed back in to pack the boats and drive out to and surfcast on foot from Coast Guard beach in the driving mist and shorebreak climbing in off the sandbars.

The skunk was out and we came back with no catch. And ditto last weekend for me and John Huth and Linda and Diane off Monomoy, not only the flats but also the Southway.

So Mark and I agreed that were we to get skunked once again on the Cape, let it be someplace new. Karen didn't care. She just wanted to paddle someplace new.
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It's a four mile crossing from Pond Village to Long Point Light off Provincetown, and since the wind was light we made the trip in less than an hour, trolling the whole way.

About half a mile from the low beach that makes that massive recurving turn west then north then east from Long Point out to Race Point, we saw three or four flocks of birds working the shallows.

We hustled over, and in those gin-clear waters running out with the tide over the glacial till off the beach, picked up about a dozen schoolies. The humps and bumps of the Provincetown tidal race squirmed on the horizon about a mile out, in the deepwater, and we let the outgoing tide carry us down to Wood End. There, in a recirculating backeddy, the water black with depth, Karen took Mark's rod and trolled it. Whack! The tip bent down, the reel submerged, and Karen found herself up to her wrists with a fish on. She reeled in: a bantam ocean bluefish thrashing off her bow. We landed it and bled it.

The backeddy released us and we began to run with the tide towards Race Point. The fish got larger the closer we got to the Race, and soon they were breaking on the surface, the air catching that distintive fresh-cut watermelon smell of a feeding bluefish school.

The afternoon wore on: I picked up a bluefish too, Karen a striped bass, and we loaded them into her back hatch for the paddle back while Mark dealt with sciatica on the beach, stretching like a tired dog.

Dusk approached; I hustled on back to Truro while Mark and Karen hung back and fished some more. The wind backed and died and then it backed some more to the south. I landed at Pond Village in the near dark and hailed Karen and Mark on the VHF to see if they had a landmark. I rolled my car down to sand's edge and turned on the headlights over the water to beacon them in.

For most of the crossing from P-town to Truro you can see the steady five-one-thousand spat of Highland Light just north of the FAA radar dome on the oceanside scarp, but come in close to the Truro shore and both the light and the dome fall below land and become invisible. Using my car lights as a beacon Mark and Karen landed; we packed and headed home.

Karen's boat has been christened: her aft hatch sticky with fish scales and eviscera, her stern weighted down with the bulk of three fish on the backcrossing. Mark caught several fish, too; but perhaps best, it was nice to have for once eschewed Monomoy, Chatham, the Nauset Inlet, and Billingsgate, all hence known as Skunktown.
getnoutside
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Post by getnoutside »

Great report Adam... glad to hear you weren't totally skunked.

I meant to tell you guys... two weekends ago I went over to Powder Point to photograph the sunrise and the schoolies were jumping only a few feet from the beach. The birds were going nuts!!!! A few opportunistic guys managed to get over in time to reap the benefits as the feeding frenzy worked it's way out to the middle of the bay

Image

Also, on the beach were the remains of 5-7 fish that someone had obviously caught, cleaned, and left the remains for the birds. For the life of me, I can't remember what they were (not herring, blues, strippers, dogfish our flounder). I've never seen them before. They don't have pronounced pointed fins on their tails, but long narrow finned tails instead. Weird looking fish.
Adam Bolonsky
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Post by Adam Bolonsky »

Hi Steve,
I'm not sure what kind of fish you saw left over on the beach. Any chance there were Tautog?

You picture (wow, nice shot) looks like such a Duxbury classic. I've never been there at dawn, but lots at sunset, and the action is the same: mad birds, eager fishermen, flat shallows, lots of fish.
getnoutside
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Post by getnoutside »

Adam, I think they were Hake's
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