Lake Champlain United - Forums

Last week my son and I went fishing out of Rockport, MA with our friend Wes ("WMHUNTS" from Iceshanty). He's got a beautiful 26' Mako that he primarily tuna fishes with, but he agreed to help us fill a cooler before we settled in waiting for a giant bluefin to bite a fresh mackerel.

We started off right of outside of Rockport Harbor fishing for bait. The mackerel weren't in their usual spots, but we were catching a few harbor pollock which would do in a pinch. Suddenly my son (Perchbait) pulled up a couple of mackerel on his Sabiki rig and we were into them good. I pulled up 6 at once, even! We put plenty in the livewell and headed out to Wes' haddock grounds.

The ocean was as flat as it gets, so we just drifted down the length of a ridge in ~170' of water. The fishing was pretty good, but we caught a lot of short haddock that had to go back. Also caught a bunch of cod which are totally off limits right now. Ended up with a nice mixed bag of haddock, pollock, cusk and cunner (little red "sunfish" looking guys with nasty looking teeth!) that filled a big cooler.

We then headed to Wes' tuna grounds, and we had lots of company. There must have been 30+ boats setup for tuna, including "Tuna.com" from Wicked Tuna. He was maybe 300yds from us. We saw several whales and an ocean sunfish, but no tuna wanted to play. We had a great time with Wes and brought home many tasty meals worth of haddock and pollock.





We also got in a little kayak striper fishing while we were down there. We each lost good ones, but managed to catch 6 little guys. Here's Perchbait with one he landed.



Looking forward to heading back down toward the end of August. Hopefully we'll be able to find some keeper stripers next time.

You had some good cod to bad you can't keep them. I see you had a Dog fish (sand Shark) I would be happy with a cooler of Haddock. Thanks for a saltwater report with nice Pics

Nice report. You caught your share of nice fish.
Always fun to be on salty water.

Thanks for the comments, guys ... we had a great time and brought home some of the best tasting fish around! We caught several dogfish. When they started biting we would move a little ways to try to get away from them.

There were plenty of cod around so the strict regulations seem to be working. Maybe next year they'll let us keep a few. The strange thing is that the commercial fisherman can keep them but the recreational fisherman can't . Seems backwards to me if you're trying to restore a population.

Missed this report, its always fun fishing with wes. My last trip we had to stop ground fishing because we couldn't catch anything that wasn't nice a cod and my arms were falling of fire from reeling up doubles in deep water.