Cape Cod local bait and baitfish for: striped bass, bluefish, bonito, fluke, flounder, scup, tautog and more. Also gathering your own bait and sources of bait. Finally, tackle and rigging for bait and basic tackle for: flyfishing and spinning and baitfishing are listed.

Bait for Saltwater Fishing

Go To Tackle & Best Lures

Buy Squid fresh (expensive) or frozen in the market (cheap) or jig your own.

Buy Herring frozen or net your own at the herring runs starting in May (check town regulations before you start). All you need is a fish net and a bucket; to keep them alive you need a bigger bucket and lots of aeration.

Mackeral frozen is just as oily as Mackeral fresh or they can be caught with mackeral rigs and little lures.

Menhaden (pogies) are plankton feeders and so can't be caught by hook except by snagging. Find a school and throw a big treble to collect bait or snag up and let the injured fish sink to the inevitably waiting Stripers and Blues below.

Buy black (American) Eels alive and keep them lively by storing them in a cooler rigged with screening to hold them above the bottom and screening above to hold ice dripping down from above (keeps 'em alive for a week!!!), cool is the rule and they won't survive under water or left in the plastic baggie. Trap them yourself (check " regs") in freshwater ponds. Use minnow pots (they like fresh fish, mussels) and along saltwater marshes in Eel pots using fresh broken horseshoe crab for bait (if the pot is going to be above water at low tide take the time to anchor some loose weed over it with rocks to keep the sun (and others) off.

Sand Eels or actually sand lances. Small eels of 3" to 6" in length. Buy 'em fresh by the baggie or rake for them at low tide (spears them on the tines). Often these are the only acceptable Striper chow.

Sand worms can be bought by the dozen or dug from the muddy flats. This is a very natural and universal bait. Use with an absolute minimum of weight, if any. Drift and be patient, big fish will take small worms.

Mummichogs (chubs, killifish, killies) are the fat brown/yellow/white minnows of the shallows; trap them up to 4" with clam bait and a minnow pot (great for Fluke).

Crabs. Check your shellfish laws for information and license needs. Don't pick up a Blue Crab if you don't know how (ever been cut by kitchen shears?) and check on minimum length to keep. Collect them at night with a flashlight in the shallows. Green crabs are bait, you'll find 'em in your eel pot, strip the leg ends, hook the side for Stripers and Tautog.

A couple local tackle shops with fresh bait can be found at the Fishing Sites page.

The Tackle Bag (and "Six Best Lures")

A minimal but complete spinning and bait tackle bag would include:

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