Cape Cod Activites, Events & Things to Do: Golf, Fishing, Whale Watches, Beaches, Shopping: Sportfishing The Rips of Monomoy

Our party of five lands our first fish within an hour of leaving Saquatucket Harbor in Harwich. Captain Mort Terry takes the 18-inch bluefish off the line, drops the fish into a tank below and prepares another line. It’s 7:30 on a beautiful sun-splashed morning, and, for a pair of fishing novices like my son Jake and me, it is the beginning of a fishing trip like none other.

On board the Fishtale, a 33-foot sport fishing boat, Mort is rigging lines for the five of us: Jim Liston (or Sonny, as he is called after the boxer Sonny Liston) is visiting from St. Paul, Minn., with his two children, Marie, 20, a college student, and David, 15, a junior in high school. Jake and I have joined them for a half-day fishing trip. I tell Mort I know nothing about fishing and that Jake knows only slightly more than I, since he went fishing once with his cousins. Mort nods. We’ll all catch fish, he says.

The action is fast all morning. For four hours, there is barely a minute when someone doesn’t have a fish hooked. Marie lands the first bluefish, and Sonny battles with another before it drops off. Mort rigs lines, and we take turns fishing from the deck chairs off the back of the boat. Within 10 minutes, Sonny and David have hooked fish. Sonny loses another one, but David lands a two-foot blue. By 8 a.m. Jake lands an 18-inch bluefish and flashes me a smile. It’s a two-family adventure at sea.

As any parent will attest, teenagers often act as if they know everything and parents are the dumbest humans ever to walk the earth. Today, however, there’s no rolling of the eyes.

By 8:10 we have landed five bluefish and kept two of them. But the better prize, the striped bass, has eluded us.

Some days Mort will fish his favorite spots about an hour or so southeast of Monomoy Island and return with 100 fish. Other days, his customers catch but one. After 12 years of charter fishing, Mort knows where to go when fishing the rips off Monomoy.

The rips look like small stationary waves that roil the top of the water for long stretches, perhaps three miles or more. The water is so shallow (15 to 30 feet deep in places) that, when the current strikes a sand bar below, it forces water to rise up over the top and cascade down. The fish – stripers and blues mostly – ride along the currents, feeding on smaller fish, Mort says.

To fish a rip, we drop our lines right into it, and Mort lets the Fishtale motor along slowly, moving parallel to the rip.

Bluefish are aggressive and fight long and hard, but they don’t have the flavor of striped bass. Once a blue is hooked, it’ll take 10 to 15 minutes to land it. Mort tells us to reel in as we let the rod down, and then to pull up, applying constant tension and keeping the fish on the hook. If you let up, the fish will wag its head from side to side, trying to throw the hook.

Stripers do not fight as hard as blues (Mort calls them lazy bottom fishers), but, when hooked, will run away with a fishing line and still resist quite well. Again, keep tension on the rod, he says.

By 8:30, we’re fishing “Joe’s Rip.” This crescent-shaped, quarter-mile long rip is about halfway between Nantucket Island and Monomoy. After fighting with a bluefish for about 10 minutes, Jake lands one that measures 34 inches. Mort estimates that it weighs 18 to 20 pounds. “They don’t get much bigger than that,” he says. Jake grins from ear to ear.

Within a couple of minutes, Marie and David each land a striper, the first ones of the day. David’s is 32 inches long. By 9:15, Sonny lands a 3-foot striper.

We move to a rip that Mort calls “Out of the East.” David lands a three-foot, 16-pound striper, the biggest fish so far. I hook a fish that fights for 10 or 15 minutes. Mort believes it’s quite a big fish. After it drops off, it becomes the one that got away.

By 10:30, we’ve landed about 20 and thrown back all but nine, five stripers and four blues. Mort turns for home. We stop once on the way in but catch no more fish. On the dock, Mort cleans the fish and packs them up in plastic self-sealing bags.

Sonny is planning a barbecue. Jake says his forearms are sore.

We drive home, talking not about the one that got away but the ones we landed. Not bad for a pair of novices.