Had Bill Tevlin, his girlfriend Steph, Bluefish Steve and Steve's buddy Ron aboard for a jig-troll-seabass trip.
Ran south, looking for some life, set up on the troll with clark spoons looking for albies and bonito between Bay Head and Mantoloking. Nada, water was dirty, and we had a nice NE swell as a residual from yesterday. Ran off thereafter, found birds working about a mile off, and as we got about 2 miles off the ocean erupted with alligator sized bluefish chasing rainfish, peanuts, and snapper blues clear out of the water amidst a fleet of around 40 boats.
We had one real good shot at them for about 20 minutes where everybody hooked up on light spinning gear w/ small jigs and topwater plugs, every one of them was 12-15# easy. Crazy stuff! Had roughly 3 more good shots of them like that, but all the boat traffic squashed everything by 10AM. We even had a few yahoos trolling through the 30 something boats that were jigging w/ wire and umbrella rigs, and sadly enough one of these guys hooked about 5 anglers fishing on a party boat - crazy stuff and it still amazes me at how ignorant some people can be on the water.
After we had enough of the combat raining metal full contact bluefish action, we shot out to the reef for some seabass. Wind was kicking out of the E at about 15 at this point, and we only had a few shorts to show for our efforts.
We finished up the ocean portion of the trip jigging a few more big blues in on the beach.
By 1 we headed in the river, put on some small storm shads, and threw them at the bridges and were rewarded with a few stripers, tops being about 24" taken by Steph.
Fun day, a lot of hard work, and a lil better than yesterday. Another great day with a great crew, we'll be back at it next weekend!
