took a half day off of work today to see if i can relive last week Wednesday's glorious bass bite (...7 or 8 fish up to 44 lbs and all on poppers and most released ). the east winds were kicking up pretty good when we got to belmar around 3 pm. decided to putz around in the river for a bit picking up some short fluke to wait out the wind.
around 5, headed out and sought bait. got around 10 livies in the baitwell (...the bunker were about a mile or so north of the inlet in scattered pods) and headed up to the asbury park area.
joined the growing fleet and marked some fish on the screen and sent a couple livies down. no sooner, we had a freight train runoff and i thought i'd hooked the fish and handed it to my buddy to fight(...he's new to the game). several minutes into the fight, the bunker comes back all scaled.
oh well. next while or so and another freight train run off. this time i let the fish run longer and i set the hook hard and fought the fish all the way. net result, about a 35 lb beauty.
after that, we had couple of half runoffs but no more fish.
in talking with some others back at the ramp, the popper bite was also on. the guys pulling out behind us had 5 bass on poppers.