Outdoors: Historic striped bass haunts bring fish back to Fall River area over the years

“Be careful out there and don’t try to row back until the tide begins to ebb.”

The caretaker pushed the skiff off the dock, then stood there watching his protégé pull hard on the handsome spruce oars he had built for me. I had made numerous solo trips across the river but not to an area where I could not be observed from the club, which was an issue for the old man who had taught me to row, net crabs and trap eels.

It was a long, hard pull to the cove, but it was usually worth the effort. The cove around the bend in the river was one of the most productive blueshell crab areas on the river.

I was accustomed to wading barefoot in the shallows on low tides, diligently watching out for broken glass because it was also a favorite spot of the underage drinking crowd who disposed of their bottles in dangerous fashion.

That day, I had netted four nice blue shells and missed many more of those alert and sharp-eyed crabs when I decided to move to the pilings on the Shell Oil docks. If there wasn’t a ship in port, I could net several crabs there, and that morning I had watched the huge tanker pull out and slip through the bridges on the morning flood.

Rather than rowing, I would stand on the anchor perch in the bow, net in hand, looking for those beady eyes or wakes of crabs scurrying for cover. On low tides, the crabs hid in the weeds and kelp beds until the tide moved in and provided them the cover they needed to begin feeding.

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I don’t know anyone who has tasted the delicate meat of a blueshell that didn’t believe it was as good or better than the much more expensive lobster or King Crab legs.

I was slowly making my way to the docks when I looked up and saw an eruption on the rocky point on the east side of the pilings. I had seen enough of those to know that was a striper, and in this case a large striper, pursuing a herring or menhaden. I watched until the surface was once again calm with no evidence of the life and death struggle that occurs in nature as predators on land and sea hunt smaller prey to survive.

I worked those pilings, but I don’t recall how many crabs I netted after watching that pursuit because my mind was not on the business at hand.

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As I prepared to head back to the club I decided to put the skiff in a position that would take me right by the point where the bass had been waiting in ambush for baitfish to swim by.

I was on the back side of the rocks when I noticed a fin pulsing slowly, and, looking harder into the stained water, I made out the big striper holding quietly in her lie, all but hidden to anyone without the overhead view my drift provided me. It was a big fish, at least to me, perhaps 15 or 20 pounds, and it was in stealth mode until the shadow of my skiff blocked out the sunlight, causing the fish, with one sweep of her broom-wide tail, to bolt away from the danger approaching her from above.

Even if that fish had remained there it was in no danger from me. I did not have a rod or reel and on this trip not even a basic handline. There was an unwritten rule at the club that was prevalent in most factions at that time: you did not make assertions that you could not back up without proof, and those tellers of tall tales at our club were assigned unflattering nicknames which I cannot disclose in a family publication.

Some fishermen as well as woodsmen have seen things they do not discuss, and I have had more than my share of mystery moments.

I did not share my striper encounter with the old timers because I know what would have transpired. Because many of those old vets were strictly bottom fishermen who successfully pursued flounder, tautog and white perch, I would have been categorized in with the “sports” who chased stripers and on numerous occasions went fishing and never returned with a single fish. I kept my experience to myself.

Biologists have a term for a stripers' inclination to return to the same habitat every year. They refer to this as site fidelity.

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My friend Bob Pond, founder of the Atom Plug company and Stripers Unlimited, claimed it was a genetic trait passed on throughout the species.

I know from personal experience that some fish return to the same location every year during their eastward migration because I have caught and released sub-legal fish in my back river that bore certain imperfections or defects that allowed me to identify them as individuals.

Over a lifetime of fishing I have located numerous sectors of river and ocean habitat where stripers return to year after year, and the aforementioned rockpile up the Taunton River is one of them.

On a cold and windy day last week, my friend Matt convinced me that we could leave the Somerset ramp late in the afternoon and still catch a legal limit of tautog in lower Narragansett Bay. On the way out I suggested we try the abandoned Shell Oil docks, where we found only very small tog chewing on our baits, with no larger specimens willing to commit.

I thought about the aforementioned rocky point where I experienced that long ago encounter with the big bass, a place that since that day continued to produce stripers, bluefish, and a few weakfish for a period of over 60 years.

We made a silent approach and maneuvered Matt’s Seacraft within casting distance of that productive piece of bottom.

On his second cast with a bone-colored surface swim bait, a hefty striper came up behind it and swallowed the plug deep into its maw. Most stripers will only strike a bait or lure in the head, but this fish came up behind and inhaled that plug right up to the snap. The trebles lodged in its gills and caused it to bleed out before I ever slipped the net under it.

If this had been a striper of less than the 28-inch minimum size, we would have had to release a dying fish back into the water. As it was, this portly female was in the 30-inch class and loaded with what I believed was roe until we filleted it. I could not believe that a fish of this size, which had very recently consumed two large pogies and a very fresh herring was still hungry, yet it swallowed that plug as though it had not eaten in days.

Those are the things that make fishing so rewarding and interesting.

I know those same ocean locations I have been fishing for ages will begin to hold stripers as soon as the mass migration of larger fish begins, and I can’t wait for this ugly spring weather to give up at least a few good days.

Fishermen have a tendency to accent the positive while sweeping the negative under the rug. Not this angler. I have wiped blood, scales and gurry from my hand way too often to not understand that this past April, and so far this May, have produced the most windy and rough conditions that I can ever recall, and that covers a very long period of time.

Charley Soares writes a regular outdoors column for The Herald News of Fall River.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Outdoors: Striped bass haunts and site fidelity near Fall River