New-moon springs load up The Race as bonito push west past Block Island

Last week the Sound was still finding its rhythm after the June full moon wore off, current speeds moderate, slack windows generous, the kind of week where you could be a little sloppy on your timing at Valiant Rock and still connect. That's over. We're building into new-moon springs now, and by Saturday the tide swings through The Race and Plum Gut are going to be noticeably harder-pulling — more water, moving faster, for longer. That's good news and bad news. Good because bigger tidal exchange stacks bait against structure and gets everything from Race Rock to the Sluiceway feeding hard on the turn. Bad because your slack window at Valiant Rock, which might've been a lazy fifteen minutes last week, is going to compress to something closer to eight or nine minutes by the peak alignment on the 11th through the 13th. If you're not rigged and in position before the tide actually stops, you're fishing the wire line through moving water instead of the dead spot, and that's a good way to hang bottom instead of a forty-pound bass.

The other piece of this week's puzzle is water temperature east of us. The cold wall that's normally held between Block Island Sound and Rhode Island Sound has collapsed — better than ten degrees of warming on the RIS side — and that's opened a corridor for bonito to spread west past Block Island toward Point Judith and, if the pattern holds, into our own approaches at the Sluiceway and outer Plum Gut. I haven't personally boated one yet this week, but the water's right and the bait's right, and I'd be surprised if we don't see the first solid bonito reports out of the Gut before the weekend's out.

On the bass, Valiant Rock is still the money spot, and it fished honestly this week — not blistering, but honest. Wire line trolled at 30 to 35 feet with bunker spoons and small umbrella rigs picked up stripers in the 20 to 34 inch range on the last hour of the ebb, with the better fish coming right at the top of the slack when the current lays flat over the rock pile. Once that happens, I'm switching over to bucktails — 2 to 3-ounce white or chartreuse, tipped with a strip of pork rind or a white Fin-S — and bouncing them off the bottom in 50 to 60 feet inside The Race proper. That's produced a few better fish, one push toward 38 inches off a boat I was talking to at the dock in Noank, but it's not every drift. You might make six passes through the rip and only two of them produce, and that's the nature of fishing structure this technical — you're not blanketing water, you're threading a needle at exactly the right depth and exactly the right minute of the tide.

Plum Gut has been more bluefish than bass this week, and they've been aggressive — 4 to 8 pound choppers hammering topwater plugs and metal on the last of the incoming, right where the Gut narrows and the water starts to boil. If you want to save your bucktails from getting shredded, throw a wire leader and don't be shy about working the surface; these fish are up high chasing bait, not sulking on bottom. That bluefish push is also a decent early signal for what's coming behind them — blues showing up thick usually means the bait's been pushed hard into the funnel, and that's exactly the kind of concentration that pulls albies and bonito in behind once the water's right. We're not there yet on albies — too early, water still needs another few weeks of settling — but I'd keep an epoxy jig rigged and ready in the Gut regardless. If bonito show, they're not going to give you a long window to switch gear.

Fluke have been sliding out of the back bays and into the inlets and rip edges all week, which tracks with what's happening everywhere from here to Long Island — the bay water's gotten too warm for their liking and the cooler, oxygenated water pushing through the inlets and rips is pulling them out. I picked up a few keeper fluke, nothing spectacular, drifting bucktail and Gulp combos — chartreuse shad tails on 3/4-ounce jigs — along the current seams off Little Gull and Great Gull Island in 25 to 35 feet on the outgoing. It's not a blitz, but it's a real pattern, and if you're used to fishing the flats for fluke, it might be time to point the bow toward the rips instead.

Black sea bass have stayed steady and dependable around the rock piles off Race Rock and the Sluiceway — jigging bucktails tipped with squid strips in 40 to 50 feet has been about as close to a sure thing as this beat offers right now, decent numbers, occasional keeper-plus fish mixed in.

Looking ahead: the new-moon spring peak on the 11th through 13th is the window I'm circling. Bigger tides mean bigger current at Valiant Rock and The Race, which should concentrate bait and stripers together right on the transition — but it also means you need to be precise, on station and rigged before the slack actually arrives, not during it. If the bonito corridor keeps widening the way the water temps suggest, I'd have an epoxy jig rigged in the Gut by midweek regardless of what else you're targeting. Best case, we get bass on the wire line at first light, blues on top through the morning, and a bonito surprise by afternoon. Worst case, the current's too strong to fish clean and we wait out the springs for the neap tides that follow — that's when Valiant Rock really settles in and the eddies get generous again.