Had the Steve Hurtuk charter aboard today, with Steve and his son Steve Jr. We 2 anglers drop out yesterday due to unforeseen issues so I made some calls, and out of the NJFishing.com woodwork came Mr. Woo (James) and his buddy Danny. Great seeing James again - been too long
Anyways, this was a fluke/seabass charter so we ran north, didn't even make an effort to get on the bass today. Fished the Asbury - Long Branch stretch, and started off on some rocks and had a slowish pick of mixed size seabass and short fluke. N current was roaring, we were using 6-8 oz. of lead and 6 oz. bucktails just to keep the baits down. The water, at least inshore, was coffee-colored.
At around 11 we ran inshore to try some fluke spots on softer bottom in the shallows - caught nothing, so we then went back out to the deeper water and rocks where we had the seabass earlier, and continued to catch.
By noon time the S wind started getting a bit brisk, and we had 2 crew members a little under the weather, so we started for home. Made 2 more drops, both on fluke spots on top of lumps and had a little better pick with the fluke - most were shorts though with 1 nice keeper going in the box @ 19".
Overall I'd say we had a very slow pick w/ the fluke, and just a pick with the seabass. No tremedous bite - we wound up with ~50 seabass, half of them were keepers; we had 2 real nice knuckleheads which were just a shade under 4# each, and the 1 keeper fluke @ 19" out of only about 15 fish all day. Nice sacks of fillets to all - and the rain held off until later in the morning, so on that front, we had a pretty good day!
