Fishing Around: Indian Summer Offers Unique Fishing
As seasonal visitors retreat to Malvern and Moorestown, remaining anglers enjoy unique fishing opportunities between Labor Day and Halloween. Pelagic species move into our area in the warmest waters of the year. Local bays teem with baitfish and a variety of predators. Along with striped bass and bluefish, surf fishermen now regularly encounter red drum around area inlets.
For many years, local charter boats made daily pilgrimages to the Sea Isle Ridge to troll for the bonito, dolphin (mahi mahi), false albacore and Spanish mackerel that gather there each Indian summer. Since 1994, Dad and I have trolled hundreds of miles up, down and across this popular spot just 15 miles from local inlets.
These mini pelagic speedsters feed on sand eels gathered by the warmest currents of the year. To imitate this small, slender forage, I turn to #1, #0 and #00 Clark Spoons and use #1 planers and 1-to-4-ounce trolling weights to keep them in the subsurface strike zone. Rig these small spoons on at least 10 feet of 30-pound monofilament leader and always use a swivel on the leading end of the leader to minimize inevitable line twist. While I pull the planer on a 20-pound conventional outfit, I use my 12-15-pound spinning rods for the rest of my trolling pattern. Start with a half-ounce white feather as your other flat line, and troll a Gotcha miniature cedar plug and a Clark Spoon with a trolling weight farther back. While you don’t need outriggers for this fishery, #32 rubber bands (the thinner ones) make great flatline clips. In fact, Capt. Homer Pratt on the Ursula would pull handlines across the transom so he could make tighter turns when he ran over a school of fish.
Here’s a quick primer on what you might catch. I convert my dolphin, if big enough to fillet, into fish tacos. Bonito, with stripes along their green back, make incredible sashimi, but you should immediately bleed and chill them. Your family will enjoy the delicate flesh of a Spanish mackerel, with orange dots, on a piece of tinfoil on the grill. But return the false albacore, with dots on their belly, unless you intend to keep them for shark bait.
Finally, I’d also recommend pulling one larger bait on a 30-pound outfit, whether a mini Green Machine, an Islander/ballyhoo combo, or a 3½ Drone spoon 20 feet behind a #2 planer. The rumors of late-summer bluefin tuna and white marlin on the Sea Isle Ridge are more than dock talk, but you’ll never know if you don’t go. You also might be surprised by a 15-20-pound dolphin or a big bluefish!
Closer to home, Indian summer’s a great time to anchor in your favorite back-bay spot with a bag of clam chum and see what swims into your slick. It’s our version of the patch reef fishing that you may have experienced in the Florida Keys. I like a 2/0 circle hook on a 36-inch, 30-pound fluorocarbon with just a 1-ounce sinker and bait my hook with the gooey part of the clam. Capt. Adam Fox taught me this kid-friendly tactic. He emphasizes that you need to fish through the scores of small sea bass because, doing so, you can catch striped bass, weakfish, bluefish, flounder, kingfish and blowfish on otherwise windy days. If it’s blowing too hard to take Jim and Patrick Ryan to the Sea Isle Ridge later this month, you’ll find us anchored up along a steep sod bank with a bag of clam chum in the water. Many tackle shops don’t stock clam chum, but they can order you some gallon bags from their bait wholesaler. I use a laundry bag from the dollar store to distribute the chum behind the boat. Don't forget to apply for your Striped Bass Bonus Tag from the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife. In exchange for sharing your fall 2017 fishing log, you can retain one striped bass 24-28", a size which fits nicely in my oven! Visit http://www.nj.gov/dep/fgw/bonusbas.htm for more details.
As I mention each fall, you’ll find me on the beach and on local jetties when higher tides coincide with sunrise and sunset this time of year. As much as I love a 1-ounce blue Gibbs Polaris Popper, nothing imitates the mullet that exits local bays each fall better than a black-and-silver Mirrolure Catch 2000. Fish this aptly coined “twitchbait” as slow as you can, whether parallel to a jetty or over a sandbar, and every so often give it a twich and wait a moment. Our resident striped bass typically strike during the pause, which creates a surf-fishing moment that you’ll never forget. I like to crush the barbs on the plug’s pair of treble hooks, which makes unhooking toothy and flopping bluefish easier and safer for everyone involved.
One of the best surprises that local anglers might encounter this fall is a puppy drum, better known as a juvenile red drum. I hadn’t seen one in person until my friend Dean Dunlevy caught a nice one a few years ago on a Townsends Inlet jetty. (You might know Dean as the affable young man behind the counter at Two Chums or the talented guitar player entertaining you all over Sea Isle.) Two generations ago, red drum, then known as channel bass, gathered around shellfish beds inside area inlets, but those clams and oysters were killed off by a parasitic protozoan known as MSX in the 1950s. Surf-fishing anglers tossed clam baits and plugs with bamboo rods armed with Penn Squidder reels filled with linen line, as I learned from Frank Woolner’s columns in Saltwater Sportsman magazine. A combination of improved water quality, gillnet bans to our south, and climate change have reintroduced puppy drum into Cape May County waters, where they are occasionally caught by anglers fishing bucktails, Mirrolures and paddletails for striped bass and speckled trout. Invest a few days throwing lures in Hereford, Townsends or Corsons inlet this fall and see if you can’t catch your first New Jersey puppy drum!
My favorite part about Indian summer is the road trip that Dad and I make to Montauk, N.Y., each October.
Clad in matching Team I Hate Cancer fishing shirts, we'll spend two days fishing with Captains Barry and John Kanavy, four and fifth generation Long Island watermen, who specialize in light tackle fishing. We time our visit to coincide with the migration of false albacore and striped bass, who feed on millions of sand eels, bay anchovies and peanut bunker corralled by the huge tides in front of the famous Montauk Point lighthouse. The blitzes that we have witnessed are burned into my retinas as immature laughing gulls hover over acres of bay anchovies balled up by 24-to-27-inch striped bass and slashed apart by false albacore of all sizes. I bring five rods – two lighter spinning rods to throw small pink paddletails to finicky fish and three others with a Rebel Jumpin’ Minnow, a white bucktail and a pink Stingsilver. If you get excited about light-tackle or fly fishing, you owe it to yourself to call the Kanavy family to bend a rod this fall. Tell them Chuck and CJ sent you!
Finally, if you’ve ever wanted to fish with one of the top crews in style, Jamie Diller donates a day on his luxury sportfisher, Canyon Lady, as a live-auction item at the Barefoot Ball, which benefits the Helen L. Diller Vacation Home for Blind Children. Don’t miss the island’s best cocktail party this year on Saturday, Sept. 9 at the Windrift!