Jason and I fished with 2 others aboard Capt. Allen's Reel Class today.
With our original plans to fish the rough stuff out front put on hold due to a stiff NE wind at 20-25 (this after the forecast called for not being higher than 10
) and seas 4-6' we started off fishing just west of the Rt. 35 bridge in the Manasquan River. WEven though the tide just started to drop the NNE wind gave us a east to west drift. Didn't matter much as we had action within a few minutes. 3 of us were using 1 ounce Spros with a 4" chartreuse GULP swimming minnow and with the same GULP on a hook as a teaser (although I opted for a GULP 4" new penny shrimp. Jason fished a chartuse GULP with a killie. For the first 90 minutes we had very steady action. Most of the fluke were in the 7-16" range, a few just missing legal size however we were able to box 3 legal fluke to just over 19"s. In addition we caught a few very nice kingfish (very aggressive biters & hard fighters). We were the only one's fishing the river but as more & more boats turned around after seeing the ocean a sizeable fleet built up but by this time the bite tapered off to a slow pick.
With the ocean still rocking, we decided to head into upper Barnaget Bay to spot Capt. Allen fished yesterday that yielded fluke, weakfish, sea bass, kingfish and a jumbo porgy. Unfortunately today nothing was home except a micro fluke and some small sea robins.
By now were getting reports that the ocean was down to 2-4' and we headed outside. Made a left after clearing the inlet and fished about 1 mile off the beach off of Mantoloking and by the 'pipe'. We were able to add another keeper fluke (only fluke we caught in the ocean) and 2 bluefish in the 8-10 class. Did see a few huge schools of bunker (one passing right under the boat) high tailing it south.
Ended the day where we started catching more short fluke and a few more nice kingfish.
We each must have caught anywhere from 20-25 fluke and even though the vast majority were short, catching them on light spinning tackle made for allot of fun.
Only down note of the day was when we witness a major assh*le blow down the river channel (in the process missing us by @10'
) with his wake pushing another boat hard (I'm talking hard enough that it appeared that the fiberglass cracked) into a channel marker. Capt. Allen did get on the horn and notify both the State Police and Coast Guard....hope they caught the SOB
