December 20, 2017 – In Retrospect, Perhaps the Penultimate – Ocean County, NJ

I thought Monday was the last jetty, but my dad was free to fish today, so we made quick plans to take one more shot at the schoolies in the surf before the holidays are upon us.  A keeper is a giant in the wash this time of year, but I will take any excuse to fish the surf with a plug.  Fluke, kingfish, short bass, puppy drum—on the right tackle it’s still surf fishing, and for me that alone has an allure and presents unique challenges, especially on artificial lures. Tuesday was ridiculously nice, too nice, in fact; I am sure a lot of mitches took sick days yesterday (no offense to you mitches who did, as I had to work in Center City and then do small engine repair on my aging washing machine) but I had a feeling that today’s early morning would continue mild and not too breezy, until the sun got up, at least.  Thankfully, I was right.  A strong NW wind in the wee hours knocked down the surf, and the same wind came back strong after a cloud-obscured sunrise, so we had a pretty uniformly dull canvas to paint on with small plugs and teasers, and we had only 2 hours of incoming tide—moving water, in other words—to work with, as well, but we found about five fish up to 24 inches.  My dad got one on his green teaser, but I managed three on a 6 inch Mag Minnow and one broadside on a snag hook meant for Atlantic herring…

 

Monday, it was all about the teaser, but today, the fish took the plug.

When we arrived at false dawn, the surf was alive with bait.  Loons and brant geese were diving for small bait, likely sand eels, but gannets were plunging half a mile off at larger fare.  After seeing a few tail swipes that looked like herring near the surface, I threw a snag hook but caught only scales until I managed to snag a juvenile bass in the tail.  The 15 inch fish had me fooled for a second, like that I snagged a big herring and a bigger bass had immediately grabbed it, but in the clear water, I could soon see that I was mistaken.  Instead of swimming the poor guy for a bit to see who would bite (kidding!), I gently let him off the hook hopefully to heal up and live to fight again.  Needless to say, I took off the snag hook after that and resumed throwing a plug.  

A little closer to legal today....

The shiny objects in the water kept us distracted from the original game plan, which was to hoof it up to a piece of structure that is not reachable from a street-end.  Of course, I hooked one that I lost in the wash, and landed two more fish, including one about 24 inches, not long after arriving at the place that was our originally planned destination.  I really wanted to get my dad on some fish, but after spending another 30 minutes fishing this spot, we found no other residents, so we moved up to one final point and hole where I figured there may be fish.  Nothing there either…  My dad’s shoulder was hurting a bit, so after a rest, he started walking back south towards where we parked. I urged him to stop at the honey hole again, and he did, and I got to watch him from a distance hook and land a shortie on the teaser.  My cough was really awesome by the time I chop-chopped it down to him to take a photo, but he was happy and seemed content to get at least one.

Until April of 2018?

We both fished this spot (again) together for a while longer and had some short hits right at the outer and inner lips of the slough, a totally different bite than Monday, where the fish took the teaser at the end of long casts, but we were there with a totally different tide and surf conditions, of course.  At slack tide, the water was just a slowly undulating mass of gray water with only a short shore break, and we were not going to wait for low tide to arrive, especially since I still have 20 research papers left to read and grades to turn into the registrar, so we called it good around 9:45 AM and headed for home.