Cape May to Cape Cod

Catch More Fluke!

As summer rolls into northeast waters, fluke fishing hits its stride.

By Zach Harvey

There’s no silence like the silence generated by three experienced fluke fishermen waiting for the day’s first bite—especially when they’re entering hour two of a dry spell. For that long, we’ve been drifting in tiny circles, making a series of scribbles on the plotter screen and trying desperately to get our baits free-spooled out away from the starboard side. A steady SW wind has been fending us off as a strengthening southbound current tries to carry us along a gravelly channel edge.

Finally, this drift, the wind is dropping out and the tide’s picking up; the chartplotter shows us moving steadily south on the current at nearly half a knot. I feel my sinker sliding over the stones and watch my rod tip intently. My sinker stops rapping across the bottom. I tense, feed line, and in one sharp movement, yank the rod skyward. Any fish would feel good right now, but this one’s got some substance. My partner stands by with the net, and as a big brown shape comes into view, I guide the fish into the net head-first. A six-pounder is no monster, but this one’s a nice bit of confirmation that we’ve been doing the right thing—that Mother Nature’s finally going to cooperate.

Fluke fishing is drift fishing, nine times out of ten. It has to be. Though they can be aggressive when conditions align, fluke are, by design and by preference, ambush feeders. Drift fishing allows you to cover ground, and allows you to present baits that move naturally with the current. The good news is that you’ve chosen the right deck layout for the demands of the fishery.

The CC Advantage

The more time you spend fluking, the more you start to wonder whether the center console deck layout was designed with fluke in mind. Specifically, the open bow provides much-needed elbow room for more fishermen. The easy access to controls helps, too, since it’s a rare day when conditions align to give you the perfect drift. In a CC, the helmsman, rod in hand, thumb clamped down on a free-spooled conventional, can adjust boat position subtly. When Mother Nature serves up the dreaded “no-drift” day, the boat bobbing in place like a Clorox bottle, you can power-drift without sacrificing a line in the water (this is also key when you fish solo).

Thinking Man’s Fishery

If you’re out to relax with the kids, set up somewhere fish have been caught recently, ideally out of the weather, deploy some baits and kick back—your work is done. If you’re bent on sticking something over ten pounds, prepare for some head-work. Where the big fluke have congregated will not necessarily be the easiest to fish, and even when the bite has been very steady, you’ll have to compensate when conditions come up short of expectations. Catching numbers will be easy, but culling the ten out of a pile of threes will be the trick.

Step one is understanding drift conditions, and more importantly, knowing the impact different condition mixes will have on the places you plan to fish. You may actually end up choosing a starting point “in reverse,” that is, selecting a certain channel edge or contour line because you know wind direction and tidal flow will line up to give you a good drift there. You can start by checking out all-important current charts and tables (like those available in many chartplotter/ GPS units or in publications like Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book), which give you an overall idea about current flow in a certain area. In Rhode Island, where I do a lot of my fluke fishing, currents in Narragansett Bay run roughly north-south, while currents along the oceanfront run east-west. You can then cross-reference these current charts with local marine forecasts to find out what the wind’s doing. In many cases, the difference of a couple hours—timing-wise—will make a huge difference in drift conditions. Sometimes, it’s worth waiting an hour to leave to avoid a slack tide or wait for the flow to switch directions (maybe lining up with the wind).

Case In Point

In general, you’ll get the best drift when wind and tide run the same direction, or when one of the two opposing forces (wind or current) is much stronger than the other, giving you a straight, moving drift. Sometimes, when the forces line up, you’ll have too much movement, and be zipping over bottom at nearly two knots.
From a fish standpoint, you’ll want to cross-reference conditions with a chart, to identify which areas are likely to fish best at which times. Point is, when you understand the interplay between conditions and spots, you can make a better plan, a plan more likely to put a welcome-mat-sized fluke in the fishbox. Where you choose to set up your first drift (or your fifth) will also require that you spend some time thinking like a fluke.

Plan For Ambush, Look For Food

Fluke, the bigger, more calculated feeders in particular, gravitate toward structures that let them feed the way they do best—by ambush. On a chart, look for contour edges, broken or uneven bottom, high spots, wrecks, reef edges, boulder fields and other areas a doormat can lie in wait for bait to be swept past. Look for changes in bottom make-up, “edges” where gravel bottom meets sand, hard meets soft and so forth. Avoid flat-as-a-pancake shoal water, avoid mud. Out on the water, look for structure cues—natural and manmade—like rip lines, eddies, channel markers or the end buoys on lobster gear, any of which will indicate depth change or productive bottom. Try to plan drifts that will give you maximum time over productive features. For example, you’ll spend more time in front of fluke if you can drift along a drop-off than you will if you drift up and over the drop-off.

Electronic Fluke

The fishfinder is important in fluking, but not necessarily in the way it is with other fisheries. You won’t often mark fluke, since they will generally be glued to the real estate they occupy. You will, though, mark bait, and where there’s bait, fluke can’t be far behind. A chartplotter can give you lots of information about aforementioned conditions, and also give you all-important data about your drift tracks. As you run back up after a productive drift, you can use the last pass as a reference point, either attempting to run down the same route, or move slightly off to one side of it, hoping to hit un-pressured bottom and “untrained” fluke. Realize that where you take one doormat, there are usually more, and that big-fish spots will fill in, sometimes day after day, with more big fish. A plotter will also tell you how your drift is doing. If your speed over ground is diminishing with each pass, you’ll know you may soon need to head elsewhere looking for better current or wind to give you some movement.

Rod, Reels and Rigs

As in other “finesse” fisheries, fluking success has much to do with the nuts and bolts of your rigging. The top-priority tackle considerations are rod and line, with reel choice—so long as you select a good, functional conventional reel—somewhat less critical. Choose a good-quality, sensitive graphite or composite rod whose guides will handle braided lines. My favorite fluke sticks have some bend right through the blank; I avoid super-stiff musky rods or rods with wimpy tip sections and big lifting power. Where I fish, most fluke fanatics use 20- to 30-pound braid, ending in a topshot of similarly rated monofilament. The mono header will function as a minor shock absorber, since the no-stretch braid and a fairly fast-action rod can result in an unforgiving hook-set that may tear a fluke’s delicate dental work.

A number of rigs work for fluke. Where you fish and what bait you use will have a hand in what works best. Bucktail jigs have worked for generations and still do. The trick to buying them is ensuring the hook running back out of the lead is fluke-sized—smaller than striper hooks, a narrow gap. Since bucktails also get a lot of work in striper fishing, it can be tough to find heavier jigs that have reasonable-sized hooks.

I tend to lean on more traditional drift rigs, tied with 30- or 40-pound fluorocarbon leader material. One basic rig connects to my topshot via a small barrel swivel. The leader stretches roughly four feet from swivel back to snelled hook (I like a 5/0 or 6/0 wide gap). Roughly six inches back from the swivel, I tie in a 3- or 4-inch dropper loop to hold an appropriate bank sinker. I’ll sometimes dress up this no-frills rig with a pink, white or green sliding rivet skirt, and many I know like beads or spinner blades for a little extra attraction. Again, you can get as technical as you want on the rigging end: tandem bucktail rigs, chrome fish ball/steamer fly combos, and two-hook “stinger” rigs satisfy specific fishing situations. If you want to keep it easy, you really can’t go wrong with the old standby drift rig.

Bait with Precision

Strip baits cut from squid tubes or fluke, sea robin or bluefish fillets all work well, particularly in combination with add-on baits like spearing, smelt, or other small fish bait. Strips should be cut carefully, thin, and tapering to point. The flesh on fillet baits often needs to get trimmed back, so there’s not too much meat on the skin to hamper the strip’s natural action in the water. Strips range in length from four to 15 inches, with the huge doormat baits of 10 inches or longer generally fished on two-hook stinger rigs.

The whole trick to baiting big summer flounder is playing to their sharp eyesight. Think of the strip not like a stinking, oozing ball of catfish bait that will lure fluke in nose-first, but as a “lure” that will imitate the fluttering action of live prey. Make sure strip baits are checked constantly for weeds, as one miniscule tidbit of vegetation on a hook will sabotage the whole operation.

Light Touch

It would be an understatement to say there’s a knack to catching summer flatties. Early on in my fluking education, I got shellacked on a near-daily basis by some very good drifters, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong. As I’ve improved, I’ve seen that “the touch” is really a combination of rigging, rod selection, technique and, above all, paying extremely close attention to what transmits back to you, via the rod, from the bait. The best fluke fishermen I’ve seen approach some heightened level of awareness as they feel their way along the bottom with their jigs or sinkers. The bite’s different every day: sometimes they’ll climb all over your bait, other times they’ll barely mouth it. The second-biggest fluke of my career, a fish roughly two ounces shy of ten pounds hit a bucktail jig with the rat-tat-tat bite of a minuscule bait thief. To improve your results, try to gather what details you can about the bottom make-up from your rod tip, paying close attention to any subtle differences in feel, and fish sharp-looking baits.

Have It Your Way

Again, fluking can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it. Catching cookie-cutter small fish—the 15- to 18-inchers—provides reliable action when the kids are on board, and there’s always the chance of a fat 8-pounder mixed in. The hard-cores in fluke fishing, the guys who do it every day, emphasize quality, with quantity an unimportant side-effect of fishing often. Anyone can go catch fluke; not everyone can catch them every day, and fewer still can find big ones consistently. If you’re up for a challenge, don’t overlook the seldom-heralded summer flounder because someone told you they were inferior sport.

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