Striped Bass Fever

The Jersey shore is crazy over striped bass as many big ones were landed this week. On the other hand, we headed offshore in the wild west wind on Tuesday and cashed in on the sea bass bite. The fishing grounds fifteen miles offshore are loaded with big sand eels and all types of marine life are feeding on them. The 25 plus knot winds and strong current made fast and steep waves, and it was difficult fishing as you had to hang on to keep from being thrown about. The sea bass came up full of six inch sand eels, so rather then wasting time with bait, we switched to power bait tubes (gitzits), that we use for codfishing, and had a bucket full of large to jumbos in an hour. We were invited on a striper trip aboard an old and familiar boat on Thursday, but declined to go flounder fishing instead. It only took about forty five minutes to limit so we played catch and release until 9:30. Evelyn landed five and I had ten, but it was such a nice day, we headed to a local creek and threw out the crab traps and had lunch. A few runs produced nothing but empty traps, until one pull came up with four crabs in the trap, the only ones we caught. We were going to try the flounders again today, but the winds are gusting to thirty knots and it is wet outside, so we will take a pass and have flounder fillets stuffed with crab meat. The boys on the boat reported two striped bass to 27lbs, and some blackfish up to 7 lbs.