Everyone,
All of us up here on Cape Ann have to wait a little longer to start hitting the fish than all you Rhody guys but things are looking up.
The cold weather has backed up our schedule a good two weeks but the attached report from the Gloucester Daily Times has some first reports of Herring runs in the Little River. Should be another great season up here and can hardly wait to wet the lines.
When you guys down South start hitting them hard, remember your cousins up North still waiting for the first bite of the year!!!
Have some sympathy please.....
www.gloucestertimes.com
Time again to 'Think Fish'
By RICHARD GAINES
Staff writer
It is time again to "Think Fish."
But rather than think striper, give a little attention to the alewife and the herring, which, after all, lure the bass back to our waters each spring.
And they now are here, at least the advanced guard.
The first alewife of the season were spotted Monday evening on the rising tide, working their way up the fish ladder at the tip of the Little River to the west of the Gloucester water treatment plant to spawn in the sweet waters of Lily and Dikes ponds.
This means that the first school linesiders will soon be in the river and that the hardiest and most ardent fly fishermen will also soon be in the river, wading from the Nichols Candy Shop parking lot whipping their imitations of live bait to the channel, where the bass are pursuing the real live bait. And the annual aquatic circus will be on again.
The first notice of the alewife run was taken by volunteers working on a scientific count organized by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.
In the days ahead, the alewife will mix with herring, a close cousin, until the rush to the spawning grounds resembles the start of the Boston Marathon.
In normal years, of which this certainly is not, the marathon and the herring runs can be virtually simultaneous, with the herring often getting to their local ladders first. But the extremely cold winter, which made early spring water temperatures as much as 20 degrees below normal, kept the bait fish down south, and about two weeks late, the Audubon Society's community outreach coordinator Tim Purinton said yesterday.
Again this year Purinton organized a scientific project to count the herring and alewife as they return to local streams along with the Little River, the Essex River and Alewife Brook in Essex, the Ipswich River, Parker River and Saugus River.
The summery southerly breezes and beachy temperatures of the last week have pumped up the water temperatures, from 37 degrees on April 10 when the counting, or at least the waiting, began at the Little River fish ladder to 52 degrees on Monday evening, when the speediest of this year's alewife school reached their destination.
The first alewife of the region were sighted and counted in the Alewife Brook of the Essex River on April 16, but were scattered "in a trickle," said Purinton, and only in recent days have been seen in concentrations.
"Now, it's really starting to happen," he said. "One volunteer counted 52 alewife in 10 minutes."
Typically, the alewife precedes the blueback herring into the spawning ponds by two weeks, and both will gravitate back to the precise waters of their birth, finding their home streams and ponds through methods that remain mysterious to scientists, though both species in laboratories seem to be able to distinguish their native waters from others by sense of smell.
But how they find them is not known.
Nor is it clear whether the stripers also return to the same waters each spring, though logic would suggest -- and many experts, scientists and fishermen believe -- at least some follow the same migratory habits year after year.
The stripers that are heading now to our waters winter in three separate locations: up the Hudson River between Albany and the Tappan Zee Bridge, in Cheasapeake Bay and in mighty schools that hold well off the Virginia and North Carolina coasts in a state of semi-dormancy, with lowered heartbeats and minimal feeding.
They spawn in the rivers before setting off for their summer haunts and arrive svelte and hungry, which is good news for fishermen, but not good for the alewife and herring who precede them up to the coast.
Against logic, there seems to be no correlation between the size of the alewife and herring runs and the size of the striper migration in the same areas. To this point, last year the feed fish count was low, but the striper population in Cape Ann waters was very high.
If past patterns hold, the fly fishermen in the Little River can expect hookups within two weeks. Liam Kelleher of Winchester Fishing Co., the sportfishing outfitter on Washington Street, has heard no reports of catches so far.
"But it won't be too long," he said, "maybe a week and week and a half."
Linear Mode
