Spring tides may bring big bass to the Bay, predicts Jim White, fishing-book author and skipper of the charter boat White Ghost. Last season, the boat caught hundreds of stripers in the 20- to 30-pound class, 16 fish over 40 pounds, 5 over 50 pounds, and a 60-pound, 4-ounce lunker, landed by Bill Nolan.

If the big-bass boom continues, it will be good news for 2008, but it may foreshadow a gloomy future. "Inside the Bay, we’re seeing fewer small fish," White says. "We didn’t get the number of small fish - in the low- to mid-20-inch range - that we did four or five years ago."

White rarely leaves the Bay; 90 percent of his fishing is north of the Pell and Verrazano bridges. Last season, his clients caught 1,579 bass, compared with 2,300 in 2006. Some of the decrease was due to the skipper’s focus on catching larger fish. After the early season, however, there were no small bass to catch.

"Early season, there was a lot of school fish on the surface almost daily, from mid-April on," he recalls. "Then, by the tenth of May, that was pretty much over.

"The menhaden came in around the fourth, fifth or sixth of May, and we didn’t see the school bass again."

The Bay held an estimated 12 million pounds of large menhaden last season. Big bass and large schools of bluefish pinned the bait in the upper reaches of the Bay. Sometimes, the predators corralled the bait in downtown Providence and Pawtucket. Later in the season, unusually large numbers of small bay anchovies appeared. When bluefish started feeding on the anchovies, the blues became as selective as trout in the middle of a mayfly hatch: They refused to touch flies and lures that didn’t "match the hatch."

Live menhaden was the bait of choice. Even anglers who fished Long Island Sound would drive up to Providence to net or snag menhaden for a day of fishing.

White is the author of hundreds of magazine articles and the book, How To Fish Plastic Baits in Saltwater. Last season, he says, the hottest soft-plastic lures were the Hogy and the Ron-Z. Tattoo’s Surface Swimmer, a wooden lure made in Rhode Island, was also effective.

The bass bite continued through mid summer. "Thousands of big stripers lingered here until the beginning of July," White says. "There is no reason to think that that will not take place once again."

Bluefish were abundant into October, but big bass stayed away from the Bay last autumn. Most of the blues were concentrated in the middle of the Bay, especially in the triangle marked by Quonset Point, Conanicut Point and Hope Island. White worked on the blues, and he used the respite from bass to write a new book about catching large stripers in shallow water. The book should be available next fall, he says.

Overall, the 2007 fishing season reminded him of the 1970s, before the striper population crashed.

"This has now become the best time in the last 15 years to catch a trophy fish inside our Bay," he recently wrote to his customers. "This current situation will not last forever. The fishery will eventually change, and as the bait migration patterns change, so will the opportunity to catch these really big fish. To be able to target these fish in calm, shallow water inside the bay is truly a unique opportunity. Now is the time to take advance of this situation."