Although fall is 5 days away, Mother Nature has shown enough signs to signal the fall run is about to begin. Bait from micro ¼” fish fry to 5” peanut bunker and mullet. With the weather not so ideal to fish around the inlet and ocean recently, I have spent some time in the back bay creeks targeting small blue and schoolie bass. Though these fish are small and young, I can tell you they are surely wise. For example, the other evening my BFF and I watched schoolie bass consistently blowing up with the feed bag on. While it looked like it was going to be like catching fish in a barrel, it was far from it! Throwing everything at em we could not connect. Even live peanut bunker drifted in the tidal outwash drew little attention. They were feeding on the smallest of small fry. Think about the smallest Sabiki rig you have seen and that is how small the fish were that the bass and blues were feeding on. Wait a minute……….Maybe I should have used a Sabiki rig! Next time.
I was out with the Tindall gang Saturday. First off, making bait was hard to do. The bunker were all down in the lowest part of the water column making it impossible to get a cast net on them. We fished the back creeks to the bridges to the Island Beach sedges and came up with a snapper and a small blue. Hey, that’s fishing sometimes. The incoming water was dirty and warm. Most of the bay was still a little turbid although we found some spots with clear water mid bay.
With the downtime I was able to get back to the video editing room and put together this video from 9/7/18’s magic hour trip. We slayed the blues that night and the magic hour lived up to its name. You can view the video here Bluefish Slayfest
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On the nature side of things: this past weekend some unfortunate person lost their life when attacked by a great white shark in Cape Cod. What is going on here is, we are seeing Mother Nature rebound from decades of over-harvesting species to the brink of extinction. Once hunted to almost extinction, our seal population is finally coming back. Their comeback is attributed to the protection granted under the Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Well, once the seal numbers started to increase so did their primary predator, the great white shark. Predator/prey relationships, it’s ecology 101.
With the best fishing of the year about to unfold, if you are thinking on getting on board the Debbie M you better think quick as my days a filling in.
Screaming drags,
Capt. Alex 609-548-2511