Kayak Night Fishing for Keeper Striped Bass Off Rockport, Massachusetts

A storm offshore is plowing mounds of swell towards Cape Ann and two days of waves breaking against Straitsmouth and Thachers have littered the islands' shores with clumps of seaweed which the waves have ground down into a sort of water-borne dust that clouds the water. The northern and eastern corners of Thachers and the reef at Londoner are overrun and awash, the waves laboring over the exposed shoals and ledges before sliding off.

It is late August, the late afternoon muted in comparison with its height and intensity of just two months before, when summer began. At 68 F the water is nearly as warm as the air. The abrupt water-temperature changes of mid-summer, when windshifts push wide columns of cold water up against Cape Ann shores one day, warm the next, are done. The water temps are not likely to change much for a month. The pines and maples and oaks onshore look tired and depleted, the effects of a long summer.

I hoist my kayak off the roof of the car and hike down to the water. It's a short paddle to nearby Milk Island. With any luck, the island's waters will be as loaded with striped bass as they were the night before.

Little more than a low-lying rocky gravel bar buttressed by boulders and rippling with seagulls, Milk Island, unlike its cousin Thachers Island, is always a disappointment to land on but rarely to fish. It has scant vegetation save weeds. There's a tiny brackish pond in one center. It sports neither trails nor beaches nor any sand or grass to sit on.

Yet its shorelines teem with fish during the fall striped bass migration, especially over the submerged rock bar which uncoils from its northwest corner like cat's tail. The bar is rocks and boulders - perfect striped bass habitat, in other words - and its waters, scraped by tidal currents, are startlingly clear. Unlike nearby Straitsmouth and Thachers Islands, whose waters are thick with shaggy carpets of bottom growth, neither seaweed nor kelp darken Milk's bar. Its waters are often the only clear waters for miles off in each point of the compass. Good sightfishing water if the wind is down.