Fly Fishing Monomoy Flats for Striped Bass

Monomoy, Pleasant Bay, Nauset Inlet all offer flats fishing for stripers on fly or light spinning gear.

"Cape Cod"

Just the name, embodies great fishing, the like of Andros Island, Bahamas for bonefish and Montana for brown trout.

On Cape Cod, "Monomoy" is the name place for flats fishing striped bass.

Flats fishing on Monomoy can be spectacular.

Covering miles of channels through and across sand bars and grass beds, Monomoy flats hosts remarkable numbers of striped bass, in season, cruising the shallows and foraging for baitfish, crabs, shrimp and squid. Good fishing starts in June as Nantucket Sound warms and the fish move from pursuing herring and squid on the ocean and the bays to foraging on the flats for smaller but increasingly numerous warmer water species. At times, schools of up to a hundred or more bass may be working a channel edge or sand flat. Stripers range from two and three year olds of a few pounds to mature cows and their suitors, measuring upwards of thirty inches or more and over twenty pounds. On a good day, a flyfisherman can expect to wear himself out at the catch and release of two to three foot linesiders. On a hard day, fish may only be willing to take a fly near dawn or on long casts with smaller flies or in the bottoms of five foot deep channels. Still available but not so obvious or easily caught.

Fishermen should plan to fish the bottom third of the tide, on either side, for best results. Stripers on the flats can be a different quarry from ocean and bay fish altogether. Being more exposed in clear shallow water, flats fishing sometimes becomes nearly as demanding as bonefishing. When the fishing pressure is up in the summer, the ability to make long casts with longer than usual leaders and the right fly can spell the difference between seeing a thousand fish without a hit and hooking up every few casts.

Other shallow water embayments offer more choices for flats fishing.

Pleasant Bay, to include the tide waters from the break at Chatham Light to the upper reaches of Little Pleasant Bay in Orleans, has extensive areas of flats and grasses that hold stripers all season long. Starting in May with the arrival of the first schoolies migrating up the east coast behind the squid and the herring, striped bass spread out over the entire area of the Bay, including miles of shallow eel grasses and sand flats broken by channels and bars shaped by the tide. Pleasant Bay is the largest embayment on Cape Cod and offers a phenomenal diversity of structure to hold fish. The eastern side of the Bay, inside North beach, is miles of shallows with few channels and offering some very good and under fished flats. Not having the image of Monomoy means that while the Monomoy may have a flyfisherman every hundred feet in July, Pleasant Bay may be entirely empty of other flats boats or wading fishermen for miles. (Times too numerous to mention, I've passed by a group of half a dozen fly casters working the edge of a deeper channel visible from the shore they had waded out from, only to round a corner onto grass flats of only a foot or two depth and plane my flats boat over the tops of dozens of keeper sized bass (over 28") that were totally unfished in "not likely looking water".) Pleasant Bay has resources that are practically untouched, despite some significant fishing pressure in "popular" locations. As a guide, it's my business to know these places and keep them in reserve for my clients for he occasional "tough" day.

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