Early last week, reports of huge catches of stripers came in from boats fishing from Sandy Hook all the way down to Island Beach State Park. The bass were sitting pretty in a huge swarm of sand eels. Then the storm hit.
Tuesday into Wednesday brought howling winds and big water, but by Friday morning the seas had calmed, the wind had dropped to almost nothing and I was damn sure it was going to be a banner day of striper fishing.
My Thanksgiving Dinner had barely had time to settle by the time Mark Modowski, Joe Cermele and I broke Barnegat Inlet aboard Cermele’s Tunacious on Black Friday morning. We hooked left, and even though the sun was barely peeking over the horizon, a substantial fleet was forming off Island Beach State Park. As soon as Joe backed off the throttle, the fish-finder lit up with bait. While the presence of so many sand eels held promise, the water temperature reading was cause for alarm. Wednesday’s storm left 43-degree water in its wake. While that’s definitely not too cold for stripers, a big drop in temperature can often send late-fall fish on their way south.
And after a full day of running between Harvey Cedars and the bathing beach on Island Beach, I’m inclined to believe that’s just what happened. In a big fleet, only a handful of bass were landed, and few, if any, were keeper sized. We found a single short striper out front and picked a pair of backwater bass on the ride back to the dock.
With the Tunacious tied up and the sun setting over Barnegat Bay, we toasted a fun—if not productive—outing. Farther west, the stores and outlets were clearing out as holiday bargain hunters returned home after their shopping binge. Fish or no fish, spending Black Friday on the water instead of in the mall is a tradition that every fisherman needs to adopt.
