Ran a full open boat trip today with Walsh, Brian, Craig P, Randy, Hollywood Bill, and birthday boy "feed me more" Jason.
Ran north, got an early start looking to jig some stuff. Started out in the deep off Asbury and caught nothing. Ran further up, and in on the beach just looking around. Found LOADS of bunker in tight, tried swimming a few but only had some monster bluefish give them a look - so with nothing going on we loaded up on more bunker then went back into search mode. Ran back to the deep and got a call on a little troll bite, but only pulled big bluefish on the shad rigs. Got another call further south, out in the deep that a lil jig bite was going on so off we went.
What we found, at first, was pure chaos with what seemed like nearly 100 boats zipping all over the place, cutting each other off (Think Jaws scene) and no bites.
We then creeped our way to the S end of the fleet, and finally found some bass. At first we had a slow pick of NICE bass in the 32-38" range mixed in with a few jumbo blues. We wound up working around this area for a bit, then finally found the motherlode a bit further up - on one drift we limited the boat out on QUALITY bass and went into C&R mode by 11 AM. At several points, we had 4-5 fish on, and I went up to the bow and swung my limit in on 2 successive casts.
After loading the box, we went inshore, did a little toggin', caught virtually nothing (1 seabass). As we were anchored up, Jason and Kenny spotted some bird play a half mile from us - nobody on them. So, we picked up the hook and went back out with the jigs on, and again, had insane fishing with an even mix of bass and bluefish - fish were blowing up all around us and the bass, at this point, were generally bigger.
At 2 we called it a day - the guys were exhausted and were complaining of sore arms from catching bass and handful of bluefish we had. We EASILY boated 40 bass today, if not more, and only 1 was short + about a dozen bluefish. We kept our boat limit of bass to around 23#, and released a solid ~25 HEALTHY fish back to the ocean. This was another GREAT day with a helluva crew in a TREMEMDOUS April jig bite we've experienced. Jig fishing for bass really doesn't get a whole lot better than this!!!
