(Continued from Part 1) Cast after cast resulted in an arm-jarring strike from the mackerel-hungry bass. Everywhere I looked up and down the canal, anglers were holding onto bucking rods attached to 10- to 30-pound stripers. All the way across the canal, it looked like bowling balls were being tossed from the Bourne Bridge as big bass demolished the pencil poppers of Cape-side anglers.

The fish weren’t terribly picky, but anything with a mackerel pattern got eaten especially quickly. I connected on a Super Strike mack-pattern little-neck swimmer, mackerel-colored pencil poppers from Cape Cod Tackle and the Daiwa SaltPro SP Minnow in green mackerel color. Dave caught fish on Sebile Stick Shadds, pencil poppers of his own design and Sebile Magic Swimmers.

With the bite registering about a 7 on the blitz-o-meter, at about 6:00 I texted Matt to get out of bed, get the video equipment and get to canal pronto. I didn’t hear back from him until about 6:20, when he asked if it was still going. It was. Matt made his way to the office, got the equipment, and by 8:00 he was on his way to the Canal with Andy Nabreski in tow to take still photographs and do some fishing himself.

Unfortunately, by 8:00 the bite had gone cold. I made the drive to the east end where there was a steady pick of fish, but no blitz by any means. Matt and Andy arrived and gave me a cockeyed look when the “massive mackerel blitz” I’d been raving about over the phone was nowhere to be seen.

Matt suggested we go back to the office, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. I suggested we take one last look just east of the herring run. Matt and Andy obliged and we made tracks for the Sagamore Bridge.

From the distance I saw a definite lack of anglers,which was a pretty good sign that the bite had gone cold. But as we got closer, I could make out some definite nervous water next to the bank. Before I could point it out to Matt and Andy, the nervous water erupted into frothing whitewater as bass ripped through the nervous school of macks. I took off running, waders and all, and before Matt could even get the camera out of the case, I was tight to a good striper.

Unique to the vast majority of my canal blitz experiences. the nearest anglers were 50 yards away, and they had plenty of fish in front of them too. Either work obligations or a lull in the action had cleared the banks of the Big Ditch, leaving the macks and bass to the few anglers who stayed behind – and for once I’d be the guy catching the bass during work hours instead of getting texts and calls about it at my desk.

Matt started rolling, and the bass and macks stayed tight to the rocks for the better part of an hour, giving us some great footage. The mackerel were so thick that I periodically snagged one on my plug. I clipped the plug off the leader of my heavy rod and tied on an eel hook I dug out of the bottom of my surf bag. After hooking the macks, I’d pass the rod off to Andy, and before long he’d turn those live mackerel into 20-plus-pound stripers.

The star of the shoot (other than yours truly of course) was the 32-pounder that inhaled a Daiwa SP Minnow and gave my CTS a workout in the ripping canal currents. As the tide slowed, so did the fishing, and around 10:00, after putting in a good morning’s worth of “work” we left the canal, grabbed some breakfast and went back to the office, just a tad late.