Sorry for the late post. My home Internet is down and I'm posting this report from my iPhone.
Had an open trip today w 6 anglers + Kenny and myself. We left early, and planned on running south where the bite has been good. After breaking the inlet @ 630 we took it slow and looked around locally. My other mate mike was out in his boat running out of Barnegat - early intel from him and his crew was dead sea down south, so we jogged north a bit. After getting a couple of calls that something was developing up the beach we went searching. On the radar, I spotted a MASSIVE flock of birds a little n and e of where we were do we hightailed it there.
Getting on the scene it was simply going off. Gannets, literally thousands of them were working a large area. Marks were top to bottom do we got the jigs in and it was game on. We filled the entire boat limit in 15-20 minutes, then played c&r for awhile. We only had maybe 6 shorts , and our biggest was around 22#. Hot jigs were pb&js and krocs, although jimmy nailed 7-8 fish on his favorite jig a crippled herring. This bite was sick and it stretched for miles!!!
After we got our fill Of the bass we went and did some bottom fishing. All drops we made were very slow - but bill h decked a beautiful, legit 4# seabass which went back unharmed, and jimmy got a beautiful 17" winter flounder - we also had a 5' silver eel. This was all n of our inlet - we finished the day on our south reef making 5 drops catching loads of bergalls and a couple of seabass plus one lonely short tog.
Called it a day at 130 - we finished the day with a full boat limit of bass + the flounder. The guys had huge sacks of fillets for dinner. This was just another great day in this extremely early bass run - fishing is fantastic and things are just getting going!!!