That's what I get trying to think I could just "drop in" and find the fish this weekend. I was in Long Beach but it seems the fish were 30 miles to the East on Fire Island. Somehow after my blog post I've become a member of Long Island Surf Fishing on Facebook. I wish they didn't find me.
For those that know then names like Fire Island, Robert Moses State Park, Smith Point, and Gilgo Beach mean more to you than me. What I do know now is where those places are and where the fish are. That area is also home to Captree, and with that the bass slaughtering Captree Fleet which runs a
bunch of head boats. I'm sure they're always "within their legal limit" but I have seen their posts from days past when there was no size limit. It wasn't pretty, maybe legal, but not sustainable.
While it would have been nice to find a fish I am glad I wasn't with the crowds out east. It kind of reminds me of those blitzing bass days at Island Beach State Park. No thank you. But it was a good day
for this father and son team above as far the guy who posted this jumbo bass (below) taken from the beach. It seems like they have the bite right now and outside of the early jumbo bass hitting eels in and around the Lower New York Harbor and the inland New York Bight it's a poke and pick elsewhere.
So that is where the bio-mass of fish is at the moment. So you can also know this. When you do go out in New Jersey over the next month you'll be casting to a fish that has already be flossed, pricked, tricked, dropped, kicked, kissed and loved before being released. So much for sloppy seconds.
While Fire Island to me is a world away, especially driving there from New Jersey, for a bass on the run it really isn't. I took a peek at Google Earth to see how far Fire Island is from Asbury Park. By the way the bird flies, or the fish swims, it's 85 miles across the pond.
If the striped bass that are there don't follow the bait down along Queens and Brooklyn, into the Raritan Bay, hit the tip of The Hook, which remember is closed due to dredging, and then come down the Jersey Shore, they could be here in five days. It a disputable fact on how far a striped bass travels in each day. There are so many factors that influence their movement. But it might be safe to say 20 miles per day, moving with the current, could be believable. So they could make the swim in 4-5 days.
Either way, this just fits into what we know. There is a bio-mass of fish, no they are not 30 miles out, that make their spring and fall migrations. That's them now in Long Island. They will at some point be "our fish". The first flurry we may see are those fish in and around New York if they decide to come up from the eel dropping depths and chase some bait, what bait, along the beaches. The second will be that Long Island bunch, and then third will be the schoolies and micros to finish out the fall and winter.