New moon springs stack the current in the Piscataqua — stripers and haddock both feeling it

New moon hit right around now, and if you've run the Piscataqua this week you already know what that means — the current through Portsmouth Harbor and under the Route 1 bridges has been ripping harder than it has since the last new moon, and Hampton Harbor's inlet has been draining like someone pulled a plug. Spring tides stack the water higher on the flood and drop it lower on the ebb, and that extra volume moving through a narrow gut is exactly the kind of current that pins bait against structure and makes predators lazy about ambushing it. We had a stretch of moderate southwest wind most of last week that kept the inshore water from getting stirred up too bad, and the surface temps along the beaches have crept up into that comfortable striper range without going full bathwater — which is the good version of July.

This week the moon keeps building toward those bigger swings through the weekend, and the alignment that matters most for us is the evening high — high stand is landing close to sunset right now, which is the window I want every time it lines up like this. That's true from Hampton Harbor all the way up through Rye and into the Piscataqua. When the flood peaks as the light goes down, bass that have been sitting deep and sulky in the heat of the day slide up onto the structure to feed in that low-light, high-water window, and they don't stay long. You get maybe an hour, an hour and a half around the top of the tide. Miss it and you're fishing memory.

Hampton Harbor has been the more consistent striper program the last week and a half. The inlet itself, right off the Route 1A bridge and down along the north jetty, has been holding fish on the last two hours of the incoming — not slamming, but steady, with schoolies to 24 inches and the occasional better fish mixed in eating mackerel-pattern soft plastics and small bunker-colored swim shads worked slow along the rocks. If you can get bait — and there's been peanut bunker starting to show inside the harbor on the higher stages of the tide — a livelined pogy under a slip float right in that current seam off the jetty has been the better move for the bigger fish. Nothing has been easy about it. I'd call it a solid two-out-of-three-trips bite, which for mid-July on a small harbor system is about what you hope for.

Rye Harbor and the stretch down toward Odiorne Point have been spottier. The breakwater has given up some bluefish in the 3-to-5-pound class on topwater poppers worked in the first hour of light, but that bite has been inconsistent — some mornings stacked up chasing bait on the surface, other mornings nothing showing at all. That's typical summer bluefish behavior around here; they're following bait pods that move, and this week those pods haven't held station. If you find working birds off Odiorne at dawn, don't wait around wondering if it'll turn on — get there.

Offshore, the Isles of Shoals groundfish bite has been the more reliable story, which is usually the case once the inshore water starts to warm and settle. Cod and haddock have been coming off the ledges around White Island and the deeper structure off Halibut Rocks in 70 to 90 feet, with the better fish showing on the up-current side of the humps where the bait piles up. Standard drift with clam bellies or a diamond jig tipped with squid strips has been doing the work — nothing fancy, just getting the boat lined up on the drift so you're ticking bottom through the structure instead of dragging across mud. Haddock have been the more numerous fish, running 2 to 4 pounds, with cod mixed in a little heavier this week than they've been most of the season — a few keepers in the 8-to-10-pound range coming out of that same water. Mackerel have been thick enough around Gosport Harbor and off Star Island that if you need bait for a bigger bass or just want an easy afternoon, small diamond jigs or mackerel trees will load the cooler in twenty minutes most days.

Flounder have been quiet inside Hampton and Rye harbors — a few keeper blackbacks coming off soft mud bottom on nightcrawlers and clam strips, but it's a slow pick, not a program. I wouldn't plan a trip around it right now.

Looking ahead, the next few days are the ones I'd circle. The evening high tide keeps sliding closer to dead sunset through the weekend as the new-moon springs build, and that's the setup that's produced the better bass action all week in Hampton Harbor. If the wind stays out of the southwest and doesn't build past 10-12 knots, I'd fish the last two hours of the incoming into that sunset high at the harbor inlet — livelined pogy if you've got bait, mackerel-pattern shads if you don't. Offshore, if you've got a bigger boat and the seas lay down midweek, the Shoals groundfish grounds are fishing well enough right now that it's worth the run — just get there early and work the drift before the afternoon breeze picks up and pushes you off the structure.