New moon springs light up the sunset flood at Woods Hole and Robinson's Hole

Last week the Bay did what it usually does in early July — it warmed up fast and got a little sloppy on the bay side while the current-scrubbed cuts stayed clean and cool. We had a stretch of light southwest wind that let the inshore water climb, and by the weekend the flats off Buzzards Bay proper were carrying more heat than the fish wanted. That pushed the fluke out of the shallow bay water and into the moving lanes — the Woods Hole channel, Quick's Hole, the deeper cuts around the Elizabeth Islands — where tidal flushing keeps things ten degrees cooler than the stagnant flats. That's not a guess, that's the same pattern we're seeing everywhere from here to the Great South Bay this month: warm, slack water pushes fluke to structure with current.

This week the moon flips the whole board. We're running into new moon springs, with the peak tidal push landing July 11–13. That means bigger swings, stronger current in the rips, and — this is the part I care about — the evening high stand is lining up almost exactly with sunset. That's the first real PM flood-sunset window we've had since the June full moon, and it's a gift for anybody fishing stripers on the turn at Woods Hole or the west end of Robinson's Hole. Bigger tide means more water moving through those cuts, which means more bait getting squeezed through the gut, which means bass showing up to eat on a schedule you can set a watch to. Wind's been manageable, no major systems stacked up behind it, so the water should stay fishable through the weekend unless something changes fast.

Stripers have been the most reliable thing out here the last ten days, but don't let anybody tell you it's been lights-out — it's been good, not great, and you've had to fish the tide correctly to get bit. The pattern at Robinson's Hole and Quick's Hole has been eels and swim-shad style plugs worked on the last hour of the flood into the top of the high, right in the seam where the current stacks against the Naushon shoreline. I had a report of stripers to 34 inches coming off bucktails tipped with a strip of squid, fished slow along the bottom edge of the rip where it drops from eight feet to eighteen. Slack water there is dead — don't waste your time — but the hour before and after the turn has been consistent. With the springs building this week, I'd expect that window to widen, not shrink. The bigger the tide, the more aggressive the bite tends to get on that push.

Bluefish have been mixed in with the bass, mostly smaller choppers in the two-to-four-pound class, but they've been showing up hard on topwater around the Sow and Pigs reef off Cuttyhunk on the outgoing. If you see birds working there at first light, throw poppers — Deadly Dicks, Kastmasters, anything with flash you can rip on the surface. It's been fast and sloppy fishing, not technical, which is exactly what you want when you've got kids in the boat or you just want some pulls before the sun gets too high.

Fluke have been the honest disappointment of the last two weeks — not bad, just inconsistent. The warm bay water pushed them into the current-scrubbed channels, but that also scattered them. Best results have come from drifting Gulp Swimming Mullets in white and pink on 3/4-ounce bucktails through the Woods Hole channel on the last two hours of the ebb, working the deeper holes in 20 to 30 feet where the current funnels bait past the ledges. I've heard of keeper fish to 5 pounds coming out of there, but you're working for them — cover ground, don't sit on one drift hoping. Scup, meanwhile, have been doing what scup do — steady, reliable, and boring in the best way, off the Oak Bluffs breakwater and the Menemsha docks on squid strips and sandworms, bottom rigs, incoming tide. If you want dinner without the drama, that's your play.

Here's the piece everybody's asking about: bonito. The cold wall that's normally holding the corridor tight to Block Island collapsed this week with a big temperature jump in Rhode Island Sound, and that's opened the door for bonito to spread west toward Newport and Point Judith instead of staying bottled up at the island. That's close enough to our water that I'm watching the outer edge of Vineyard Sound and the approaches off Cuttyhunk closely over the next week or two. Nothing confirmed inside our zone yet — I want to be straight about that — but the signal is real and it's moving in our direction. If I had to guess, the first scout fish show up on the outer rips off Cuttyhunk or the western edge of the Sound before they ever show at Robinson's Hole.

As for albies — I know that's the question everybody's really asking, and the honest answer is: not yet, not close. That program doesn't start lighting up until the water cools and the bait pulls out of the estuaries, usually late August into September. Anybody telling you different in July is selling you something. Right now, fish the tide, fish the cuts, and keep an eye on that bonito line creeping west. If the springs hold through the weekend and that sunset flood window keeps producing at Woods Hole, that's where I'm putting my time before anything else.