Welcome to Autumn
First, something important…
We’re asking the fishing community for help. Our good customers Gary and Helene Dzielinski just recently found out their beautiful niece Lilliana was diagnosed with a Brain Tumor. Her parents Amanda and Tiago have been faithfully by her side every single day since diagnosis. They are doing everything in their power to give their little girl a fighting chance to recover from this heartbreaking news. Please visit their GoFundMe page: https://gofund.me/a14fbe26. No donation is too small. Thank you.
Now shop news
We got in some new stuff this week. First, we got in a couple of new colors for our hats. For the Grumpys Vintage Logo Hats, we added charcoal as an option. For our trucker hats, you now have the option of getting an all black hat. We have also restocked on most of our other colors.
We added a nice new product from BKK. Their Fast Snap-41 is a nicely designed quick snap with some features not found on other snaps. They are smaller and lighter than other snaps, so they will not adversely affect the action on smaller plugs. They have an indentation on the line tie side of the snap so 1) you know which end to tie to your leader (just admit it, we have all done the other styles backwards before) and 2) the line will not as easily slip around the wire of the clip and slide off like what can occasionally happen with the paper clip style clips. They come in 5 sizes from weights as light as 13 pound test for ultra-light applications to 80 pound test for more conventional surf fishing.
For those who have been looking for gliders, we got in a shipment and have restocked on Salty C’s Gliders. These are great peanut bunker imitations.
So, Fiona blew by the Garden State on its way north this weekend. The surf was huge on Friday but managed to calm to a reasonable level for the rest of the weekend. The good fishing we had prior to Fiona bounced right back. The most common fish in the surf, for the first time since early July, is not fluke. It’s bluefish. The cocktail blues have been readily hitting mullet on mullet rigs. If you want to throw lures, poppers and metals like Deadly Dicks are the way to go.
The fluke are still there, and you have until the end of day Tuesday September 27th to catch them. They are hitting, as always, bucktails and Gulp!.
The false albacore have made sporadic showings too. When they come into casting range, epoxy jigs are the way to go.
There have been some striped bass caught in the surf in low light conditions for anglers throwing plastic swimming plugs like the SP Minnow or the Nomad Designs Shikari.
Off the jetty rocks (when the waves calmed down enough), green crabs on White Chin Wreckers were producing blackfish. Blackfish were also coming out of some of the back bay spots that tend to hold them. Sorry, no spot burn on this one…
The blowfish are still plentiful in the back bay, and our very own Frankie Z said he found hordes of them in the Manasquan River on Friday.
Here are some notable catches:
Shel E Caris landed a nice albacore Saturday morning on a Hogy Epoxy Jig.
Rich Petrie landed a 4.05 pound Triggerfish from the rocks out on IBSP. He said the fish took a green crab.
George Horvath with a 16.5 inch, 2.35 pound catfish caught on the north jetty using a Nomad Designs Vertex Max Vibe. He said it put up an incredible fight, making 3 long runs before he could get it to the rocks. (ok, seriously, it was caught in freshwater on corn...)
Sunday was Ray’s birthday. For his birthday, his favorite American football team, the Commanders, lost handsomely to the team from Philadelphia. Since this was bad enough for him (and not helped by some fans of said Philadelphia football team pointing it out to him) we are not going to pick on Ray this report. Well, not anymore than we already have. We did learn this week how Jenni eats a pumpkin pie. Actually, Frank learned, but he let everyone else know. Turns out, she also eats birthday cake that way too…
