I echo the great pictures. The gull-like bird off the jaws of the humpback whale in the top picture appears to be a jaeger, probably a parasitic jaeger.
My wife and I will be on the Cape after Labor Day. Did you use a specific whale-watching company? Did you use wire tippets or another type of bite-guard for the bluefish?
Steve
Steve it was dolphin fleet out of P-town. We've gone in years past but never seen breaches, let alone multiple. Plus saw finbacks and minke whales as well. years ago I came across a beached finback in Wellfleet bay, stunning how huge it was, the eye the size of a dinner plate....
That bluefish was hauled in without wire, which was lucky. Single barbless hook on the end of a kastmaster, fortunately enough metal between the hook and the line to save my metal....that or no other schooling blues to attack it. That's happened in the past, pulling in one fish, the others are trying to steal the metal, snip, gone. For whatever reason the blues seemed relatively solitary, I never got into a feeding mess, never had bird action to target, and yet all where exactly where you would predict a fish should be though, sitting just to the edge of a rip right at twilight.
I have found the stripers generally are not as easy to get interested if using a wire leader. All striper hookups were in the undertow drop off/gutter, just as you are about to get ready for the next cast, all over a rocky, not sandy wash. September should be fantastic, better than July, I'm jealouos!
The beach that was hands down the best structure, rips, sandbars and shoals was Head of the Meadow > Newcomb Hollow, with the latter being surprisingly good, hooked one blue there, a couple of hickory shad (I think) also. By september all of it could change, but if you had some dawn time, head of the meadow would be on my agenda
A cool phenom I saw there was dragonflies, running north on the first row of dunes, tens of thousands of them, feeding on horseflies. It was probably one of the coolest things I saw that day, until the whales that is. Plus, there were very few horseflies...
you may have to pay your respects to the shrine of dead striper
Also, Stones would be proud, found some glasses:
