On The Water

“They’re here, I know it,” Brad Leone says, tapping two red smudges on his Simrad as we bob up and down in a rip near Napatree Point. It’s mid-May, but the weather doesn’t seem to know it yet. A spring cold front has bathed the Connecticut coastline in mist, and with no other boats on the horizon, we drift in silence. For the past hour, Brad has scoured Fishers Island Sound in search of migratory striped bass. Determined to not go home empty-handed, he checks his charts.

Barracuda aren’t supposed to be here. But when a warm-water eddy breaks off the Gulf Stream and pushes into the Northeast Canyons, anything from wahoo to marlin to, apparently, barracuda can show up in the spread. That’s exactly what happened this past weekend aboard the Silent Witness, a 39’ Yellowfin, on a Saturday-to-Sunday run through the canyons.

A once-in-a-lifetime striped bass blitz unfolded in the Cape Cod Canal when an incredible concentration of shortfin squid moved into the area. Jimmy Fee, Alex Blackwell, and Matt Haeffner break down the entire event—from the mysterious squid beachings and the first reports of giant stripers eating squid, to racing down the canal, finding massive schools of squid, and watching 40- and 50-inch stripers absolutely annihilate them.

In 2025, volunteer anglers from Rutgers Fish Tagging Research and Education Program tagged 30 sheepshead from pedal-driven kayaks. As the days shorten, beaches empty, and the vicious greenhead flies finally disappear, the Fall Run across Mid-Atlantic states begins.

If there’s one time of year that can humble even experienced bass anglers, it’s the fall transition. The calendar says autumn is here and the mornings are cooler, but the bass don’t always seem to follow the script. One day they’re stacked on offshore structures, the next they’re chasing bait up on the bank. Whether it’s the fish themselves or the water they live in, things are constantly in flux.

To most outdoorsmen, “Buffalo Hunting” conjures up images of industrial frontiersmen hunting massive mammals and stacking skulls stories high, but to a small group of fishermen from Harker’s Island to Cape Cod, it conjures up something quite different. On a windy and wet late fall day, I boarded the 6am ferry to Nantucket. There, friend and co-worker Jack Larizadeh awaited me with his Boston Whaler.

Few things in bass fishing get my adrenaline pumping like the thump of a good jig bite, and I think most Northeast bass fishermen would agree. However, there are several seasonal windows when a full-bodied jig with a dense skirt and hefty trailer fails to tempt largemouth and smallmouth bass. During ice-out, the post-spawn, the summer doldrums, and again in late fall—when bass are often keyed in on schooling juvenile baitfish—it can be difficult to coax pressured or lethargic fish to eat a jig.

IG: @stonefornes Stone Fornes has a knack for catching fish that make headlines. In August 2024, the Nantucket angler — then 12 years old — boated a white marlin so big it shattered the IGFA junior world record.

It was 8:00 a.m. on an overcast May morning on the shore of Lake Erie in Buffalo Harbor State Park. I engaged my left cleat, followed by my right, into the retention springs of my gravel bike’s clipless pedals and propelled myself forward from the westernmost terminus of the Erie Canalway Trail (ECT), a 363-mile shared-use network of paved, gravel, stone dust, grass, and dirt paths running between Buffalo and Albany.

Rescheduled from a rainout, Sunday’s gathering at Barnegat Dock brought together local anglers, police officers, and a dozen species of fish and crabs for a day the whole community showed up for. Rain pushed the date back a day, but it didn’t dampen the turnout. On Sunday, August 23, nearly 100 kids and their parents packed the municipal Barnegat Dock for the annual “Casting with a Cop” event, casting lines and crab traps alongside officers from the Barnegat Police Department.