The Fish Wrap Writer Blog
For more than 20 years, we have been learning from and writing about outdoorsmen and women who fish, hunt, hike, pause, and sometimes just look around. Fish Wrap has been published over 480 times. Here you will find articles, interviews, reports, laughs, a few stretched truths (that’s true), and an unfortunate number of obituaries from good folks we have lost.
Please search, enjoy, and let me know if you know someone who we should meet.
Brightest Faces-Biggest Fish
Please meet the Simpson family and their young sons with a keeper striper and have your faith in people and respect for veterans renewed. Brightest faces indeed. This family is an inspiration and man, those brothers, well they can catch some fish.
Capt. Rene Letourneau & Dave Henault: Two Classics Who Really Know Their Fish
Fish swim. When you’re fishing the same reefs the day after bait tye-dyed your color machine and stripers were all but inviting themselves aboard and now you can’t find a single one, you start reaching for answers. Not excuses, explanations. One day does make a...
How Local Guides Catch Bonito and Bonita
We hear from local guides who know how to find and land those favored fish of Fall.
6 men, 6 kayaks and a very big ocean. What fun!
At 5:00 a.m., kayaks were being unloaded in a dark dirt parking lot. Gulls stretched their wings and walked about in only the earliest hint of a calm new day. When all six boats were staged, six fishermen in an impossible array of colors and camo’s smiled for the...
The Fish Wrap Writer joins forces with Outdoor Enthusiast Lifestyle magazine
We here at the Fish Wrap Writer are happy to announce that I'll be joining forces with oelmag.com. as the Fishing Editor for the new premier Outdoor Enthusiast Lifestyle magazine. Great articles, how-to's...
Finding Fish in an August Salt Pond
This article appears in the The Shore Times magazine, distributed throughout SouthCounty, Rhode Island. I am more than grateful to be part of that magazine and family of newspapers. For August, for heat, for placid sunrises and windy afternoons, for stripers...
Waders wet & hands dirty: that’s Trout Unlimited’s Jeff Yates
The cell phone went dead four times in half an hour. From Pennsylvania’s Route 80, Jeff Yates kept calling back because our conversation about conservation was important and timely, in light of an administration bent on overturning basic environmental protections,...
Science never quits (even if you delete it from an EPA website) & fishing for data on URI’s Cap’n Bert
Joe Zottoli told me to be at the dock for exactly 8:50 a.m. It was very clear that details were important, like being on time. He’s studying Biological Oceanography at URI’s Graduate School of Oceanography, runs the deck of their 53’ workhorse research vessel, the...
RISAA, Fish & the Kids Who Love Them
“Whatever I catch, I’m going to say it was three times bigger.” 13 year old Tim Roberts started a day of fishing by sinking my writing plan. Drifting along Warwick Neck in Captain Tim Wordell’s bright white Cobia, the younger Tim was a camper with the R.I....
Sometimes water makes us suffer and like it.
“Ah summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it,” wrote Russell Baker. July sometimes means fishing cools as waters warm for she is a long month of hot water pushing trout to precious few cool pools, black sea bass to dark deep wrecks and stripers...
A Fish Whisperer & An End to the Trailer Trash Saga
So I called the Fish Whisperer. Now is when stripers really head for Block Island but they are fickle, their appetites fluctuate and frustrate. Catching them doesn’t seem to be as easy as it was years back. That said, Islanders enjoy a long view of those beaches...
How to find love On The Rocks & other fishing classics
It was a long awaited Friday night fights in South County salt ponds. Finally a full day of warming sun brought cinder worms from the mud to a muddled windy surface so the dance could be begin. It was a worm hatch like you read about, which we hope you read about...
Crazy Albert and catching two rainbows with one cast
Dock talk is still all about big bass keeping to themselves at the top of Narragansett Bay. South coast fishermen are finding piles of schoolie salt pond stripers but few keepers. Cinder worms have made only fleeting appearances while sand worms appear to be...
How to find big bass, get out-fished and then find public access to a public beach that’s pretty much private
The big bass continue to hold tight to the top of Narragansett Bay. Live pogies are still the best bet for the big girls and several fishermen have reported stripers in the 28”-40” range. Down south, the salt ponds are producing plenty of schoolie bass action....
How To Catch A Beast of a Bass & A Shaky Cinder Worm
The big fishing news is that Cape Cod fisherman Jeff Fortin outlasted a 64.6 pound striper in Buzzards Bay. It’s a seriously impressive fish. So early in the season, it’s hopefully a good sign that fish of such size have already moved in to feed on pogies and...
Learning from local fishermen
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse meets with RI commercial fishermen to better understand catches and the science of data harvesting on open seas.
Public Access & Losing It
Narragansett Bay is teeming with stripers. It’s easy to access them from beaches, breakwalls and kayaks, from river mouths to the upper Bay and the Taunton River. Our CRMC provides a wonderful, interactive map of public access spots, which you can find at...
stripers, shooters, wardens, thieves and Jimmy Chappel. That’s a full Fish Wrap week.
This is the time. Bucktails, teaser flies, Cocahoe minnows. Seven foot medium weight rods for kayaks in salt ponds, ten foot surf rods for long beach casts. Buckies, pogies, silversides. D.O.A. jerkbaits, topwater schoolie action and everything tipped with squid....
RIDEM regulations hearings announced
RI DEM will hold public hearing on draft regulations for recreational fishing, hunting, falconry and parks regulations on the following two dates Monday, May 8, 5:30 p.m. at DEM Headquarters | Room 300 235 Promenade Street Providence, Rhode Island and then...
Bill, Beers, Bill, Bears, Bluebacks, Buckies. That’s no fluke…
If there’s water involved, Bill McCusker is willing to get wet. He’s a tireless volunteer and advocate, a guy who collects water samples for URI’s Watershed Watch, has happily volunteered countless hours to the Wood Pawcatuck Watershed Association, dragged hoses...