Like so many fishing trips in mid-May, it began at first light with caffeine and sky-high expectations. My host Jonny Rego’s brief recon trip the day before confirmed the arrival of big, ravenous bluefish in upper Narragansett Bay.
There was no hint of wind as we slid our kayaks off the sand beach and began pedaling. Conditions couldn’t have been better for spotting bluefish cruising the shallow flats of Greenwich Bay, a sheltered offshoot of Narragansett Bay just south of Providence’s TF Green Airport. I had three rods rigged and ready: one with a topwater plug (a bone-colored Doc), one with a Z-Man soft plastic (in case the blues were the slightest bit picky), and a fly rod with a popper on a wire bite tippet (for when I’d had my fill of catching gator blues on spinning tackle).
Within 200 yards of the beach, I spooked a fish just ahead of my kayak, a quiet swirl on the surface that grew to a sizeable upwelling. I halted my pedaling as the unseen bluefish kicked off and I coasted another 10 yards, setting off two more bluefish boils. Heart pounding, I reached back, lifted the spinning rod out of the rod holder, and unhooked the back hook of the Doc from the reel handle.
The first cast landed with a splash that spooked three more blues. The fish were everywhere. I started the zigzag, walk-the-dog retrieve, listening to the rhythmic knock of the lure’s internal rattle, anticipating the stillness-shattering blow-up to come at any moment.
I was surprised when the plug came all the way back to my kayak without even a follow, and shocked when the next five casts yielded the same non-result. I looked over toward Jonny, who was experiencing the same frustration.
“Looks like they’re being super picky this morning,” he said.
It would’ve been easy to pivot to another option—Narragansett Bay has plenty of them to offer kayak anglers. The largest estuary in New England, it’s fed by fresh water that becomes brackish as it flows in from the Providence, Taunton, and Sakonnet rivers, and mixes with tidal ocean water rushing around Jamestown, Aquidneck, and Prudence islands. It features a wide range of aquatic habitats, from shallow muddy flats and back waters in the upper bay, to deep rock ledges and ocean swell where it opens into Rhode Island Sound.
Narragansett Bay is a destination fishery for spring and fall blackfish. It is well known for its striper run that starts with fresh schoolies in April, continues with big bass on bunker (menhaden) through the spring, and gives up stripers in deep water throughout the summer. There’s the influx of bluefish in mid-May, a resurgent weakfish bite in spring, and then albies and bonito charge in from the ocean in late summer. Finally, bottom fishermen can put together a mixed bag of fluke, sea bass, and scup.
While shore-based fishing access is an ongoing issue in Rhode Island, acres of water are open and accessible for a kayak angler who, with a sturdy set of wheels, can cart a vessel across many of the beaches and right-of-way areas located around the bay. If wind, waves, or boat traffic make kayaking a challenge on open areas of the bay, there are countless protected areas and leeward shores that provide safe and productive fishing.
Jonny and I switched to soft plastics, expecting the wary blues would be unable to resist. I managed a follow that waked behind my paddletail before disappearing in a boil a rod’s length from my kayak.
Jonny was starting to feel some pressure, since he’d invited me down with a cameraman in tow, now thinking that the promise of epic video content was in danger of being thwarted by bluefish acting in a decidedly un-bluefish-like manner. Some quick recon on the handheld VHF confirmed that other kayak anglers in the area were experiencing the same, with a few of them abandoning bluefish to pursue other species.
We switched to trolling minnow plugs—not as exciting as casting, but almost certain to generate some action. We covered water. We spooked more fish. Jonny spotted dozens of fish on his side-scanning Humminbird unit. We spooked those, too; still nothing.
The phenomenon of picky bluefish on shallow flats in spring isn’t limited to Narragansett Bay. I’d run into the same situation kayaking the flats of Cape Cod, but I can’t say that I’d ever seen this many bluefish in one area and not been able to get at least a few reaction strikes.
As the sun got higher, a breeze picked up. I had taken a break from fruitless casting to work on my coffee and watch a JetBlue flight gain altitude overhead when I heard the unmistakable sound of a fish blowing up on a lure. I pedaled over to shoot some photos of Jonny’s 8-pound bluefish and find out what had finally gotten the skunk off his Old Town kayak.
It turned out to be a paddletail swim shad that he’d sacrificed to the teeth of a bluefish, one of several lures that had been ignored on dozens of previous casts. Maybe it wasn’t the lure, but the fish were finally starting to turn on.
With renewed optimism, I fan-casted the Doc. Not 5 minutes later, a bluefish smashed it a split-second after it hit the water before I had even started a retrieve.
As the wind picked up, the blues started behaving more like bluefish, following and striking the same lures they had ignored all morning. A few mid-20-inch stripers found their appetites as well. Whether it was the building wind, changing tide, or time of day, something shifted, and Narragansett Bay showed off, once again, why it’s one of New England’s greatest fishing destinations.
Kayak Fishing Access Points
Narragansett Bay has excellent kayak-fishing access, especially if you can use a cart or hand-carry your kayak and don’t need a ramp. Here are some popular access points:
Upper Bay
1. Salter Grove Memorial Park (Warwick) – Easy launch, good for spring stripers, access to rocky structure.
2. Conimicut Point (Warwick) – Access to Providence River, though be aware of strong currents.
Mid Bay
3. Goddard Memorial State Park Beach (East Greenwich) – A good spring spot with access to flats and deeper channels.
4. Wickford Cove Kayak Launch (North Kingstown) – A sheltered launch with access to Wickford Harbor and the bay.
5. Compass Rose Beach (North Kingstown) – A convenient launch near Quonset with access to the open water of the West Passage.
Lower Bay
6. South Ferry Road, University of RI Bay Campus (Narragansett) – Access to deeper waters, good for stripers throughout the season and tautog.
7. Third Beach (Middletown) – Great for launching into the Sakonnet River, where you can find striped bass, fluke, albies, and bonito.
Jonny Rego grew up fishing Narragansett Bay by shore and boat, and for a few seasons, he guided kayak-fishing trips with Rhode Island Kayak Fishing Adventures, owned and operated by guide Dustin Stevens. Rego’s kayak-fishing season starts and ends with blackfish, but in between, he targets every species and even does some recreational lobstering from his Old Town Autopilot kayak.
“Narragansett Bay is a really cool fishery to be able to access from a kayak,” he said. “There’s just so much going on, especially in May and June. Fish move up from the ocean into the bay’s warming waters, then the bay gets too warm, and they start vacating back toward the ocean. There are so many different avenues you can approach fishing the bay.”
Rego’s spring kayak fishing begins by targeting tautog in early April when the water temperature is around 46 to 48 degrees. He seeks out typical tog structure like bridges, oyster beds, wrecks, and rock ledges, fishing with Asian crabs he gathers along the shoreline.
“I learned a lesson a few years ago about what baits work best, especially in the spring,” Rego said. “I was fishing green crabs, but Dustin Stevens was using Asian crabs and totally outfished me.”
Rego starts by focusing on bridge structure, often using his kayak paddle to knock barnacles and other critters off the pilings to act as chum that draws in tautog. Then, he sets the Spot-Lock feature on his kayak, which acts as a GPS-enabled anchor to hold him next to the structure.
While bridge supports are fantastic structure for tautog, they draw a lot of attention from anglers and can get fished out quickly. At that point, Rego moves on, using his electronics and Navionics mobile app to find new spots.
“I try to find hidden treasures, like a wreck or even oyster beds,” he said. “There’s a lot of water to cover in the bay, and from a kayak, I don’t have the speed to go as far as I might want to. The benefit is that it encourages me to search for under-the radar spots that don’t get as much pressure.”
Striper season in the bay begins shortly after the first migratory schoolie stripers show up around the second week of April along oceanfront beaches and at Point Judith. Those fish begin moving into the bay and mixing with any striped bass that held over through the winter in brackish ponds and up inside rivers. Then, in early May, the first wave of bigger bass arrives.
“The first new and full moons in May are when I’ve noticed big pushes of big bass into the bay,” said Rego. “Herring and bunker schools often move in at the same time, and we start to see bigger bass on top.”
Along with typical soft plastics and topwater plugs, Rego believes flutter spoons are super-effective on stripers moving through the bay on the tails of bunker schools.
“Fishing flutter spoons has quickly become one of my favorite methods,” he said. “They have become popular with boat fishermen, the bait shops couldn’t keep flutter spoons in stock last spring.”
Rego uses a Humminbird Helix fishfinder with side-scanning sonar to find schools of fish moving through open water, then sets up over them and drops a flutter spoon.
“It is a really fun way to catch striped bass,” said Rego. “You hook a forty-inch striper in forty feet of water jigging with a spoon, and it’s a battle. Hang on tight, because that fish is not coming in easy.”
While bunker spoons are highly effective in the spring when bass are aggressive and keyed in on bunker, they tend to ignore spoons once the bay’s waters warm. In midsummer, when large bass slide down toward the cooler, deeper waters of the lower bay around Newport and Jamestown, trolling a tube-and-worm rig from the kayak can bring daytime strikes from lethargic stripers.
Rego keeps his trolling rig simple: no leadcore line or keel sinkers, just braided mainline to a 40-pound fluorocarbon leader clipped to a tube. Since he typically trolls in 30 to 40 feet of water, he pedals as slowly as he can to keep the rig just over the bottom while keeping an eye on the fishfinder for bass holding tight to the bottom.
“I have no idea why, but there’s something about a tube and worm trolled slowly along the bottom that big bass just can’t resist,” said Rego. “It’s like a cheat code. And though some people might think trolling sounds boring, when a big bass strikes your trolling rod on a kayak, it’s a jolt that you feel through the whole hull and into your seat. You often know right away it’s a big fish and you’re going to get towed around. It’s an adrenaline rush, for sure.”
In most years, bluefish arrive in Narragansett Bay like clockwork around the middle of May, often shadowing menhaden schools. They’ll quickly amass in bays and on sandy flats, although whether they are there to actively feed or to digest food in warm water is up for debate. If you can find them and get them to strike lures (which, Rego claims, is the case 90 percent of the time), it can be absolutely lights-out fishing.
“What I love about spring bluefishing is it takes place in protected, shallow areas where I don’t have much competition from boats,” said Rego. “It’s like a kayak haven, and I get the thrill of big gator blues smashing topwaters and leaping out of the water.”
For reasons that nobody can fully explain, the up-and-down weakfish population seems to be on an upswing, and Narragansett Bay has enjoyed a consistent spring bite for the past few years.
“Five years ago, a weakfish was a unicorn—that’s how rare it was to catch one,” Rego said. “We’ve had a good run the past few years, and it’s definitely captured the attention of kayak anglers. In the spring, you’ll see bunches of kayakers working areas of the bay where weakfish tend to be caught.”
The influx of small baitfish, including bay anchovies, peanut bunker, and silversides, often brings in bonito and false albacore in late summer and into the fall. While the bonito schools usually arrive first and are soon supplanted by albies, in 2024, large number of bonito stuck around while the albie bite never really materialized.
In a more typical year, kayak anglers will head toward the lower bay, particularly around Newport and the mouth of the Sakonnet River, to chase albies. In good albie years, the fish push further into the bay, often leading to mixed surface blitzes of albies, stripers, and bluefish.
For such a large and diverse fishery, Narragansett Bay has a tight-knit community of kayak anglers who are more willing than most to share information and look out for each other on the water. At popular sites, you’ll often see kayak fishermen gathered pre- or post-launch, sharing stories and exchanging Instagram handles.
“If you’re just getting into kayak fishing or want to try it, you can’t beat the experience of hiring a kayak-fishing guide to take you out,” said Rego. “Once you’re into it and looking to establish a network, it’s pretty easy to meet other kayak anglers and start sharing information. And, with a fishery like Narragansett Bay, there’s always more to learn from each other.”
Choosing the Right Pedal Fishing Kayak
