Amazing Fishing in Buzzards Bay

    Today I woke up at the ungodly hour of 4 am to fish with my friend Eric Meyer and his son Zach
on Eric's boat boat. Our target was black sea bass in Buzzards Bay. Hopefully scup would be a nice bycatch, and of course any stripers or blues would also be welcome to come aboard the boat. We were in the water by 5:30 am. I was given information on where the fish should be and how to catch them. This info wasn't just helpful pointers. more like a tutorial with all the info we needed to put fish over the boat.  This info was absolutely invaluable. Thanks again!

I brought two rods. One was set up for bait, the other was set up for lures. I never ended up using the bait rod. For lures I used  a three quarter ounce bucktail jig, a 3/4 ounce jig with a 4 inch zoom fluke, and a Kastmaster XL. For the first half of the trip Zach used a bait rod with two hooks. When Eric saw my fish caught on bucktails, he started using them tipped with squid.

To make a long story short, we each caught a hundred fish. While Zach was using the bait he was catching scup after scup with a few sea bass thrown in. When he switched to a bucktail tipped with squid, the percentages flipped to mostly sea bass. However, by that time he had proudly earned the nickname of the "Scup King",

Eric caught almost all his fish on the bucktail. His bucktail was at least an ounce and a half. If you seperated all the big sea bass from the smaller ones we caught today, although we didn't count, I think Eric caught the most over three pounds.

As for me, I had my best luck on the bucktail. I was doing well on the jig/fluke but was going through flukes like crazy due to the pulling nature of the scup and sea bass. The same can also be said of my curly tail grubs I had on to give my lure some action. Scup were chomping the tails to bits.  Sometimes I would also put a small squid strip on any of the three lures I used. I probably caught half my fish with squid tipped hooks and half without. I fished the Kastmaster XL the least, but still caught about five fish on it.

I caught one sea robin. Surprisingly we did not see a any blues or stripers. Most all the scup we caught were over the 10 inch limit. We caught some real monsters at least fifteen inches. I'd say over half the sea bass were keepers. Tons of them were in the 13.5-14.5 inch range (legal to keep is 14 inches and you can keep 8). After the initial few minutes, Eric was only keeping fish over 16 inches. Wanting to go home with fish, I kept a few in the "just over 14 inch mark). I limited out and brought home more scup than I wish I did. Not knowing when I would get back out, I wanted a couple meals
I can honestly say that today was one of the most epic fishing days on my life, but here is the amazing

A typical sea bass for the day by size,
but one of the pretty blue ones

thing; it was just a typical day for Buzzards Bay

photo credits; Me for the pictures of Eric
Eric Meyer for all other photos

One of Zach's huge scup

One of Eric's bigger and prettier fish