Recent Daily Reports
If you missed these days the first time around.
Monday, January 01, 2007: Waves: Building 4 to 6 feet, stormy. Water clarity: Fair but likely to get murky by tomorrow.
Not nice out there. Rains moved in early and south wind picked up seriously around midday, switching slowly offshore late. This will throw a belch into the bass bite but there is nothing whatsoever to believe we won’t transition into Bassing 2007 – via the backdoor. The front door is your typical entrance through the spring vestibule, circa March-ish. Below is a blog regarding the weird warmthness out there and the way it methodically moves us one temperate day closer to spring. Same thing can be said of the long-lingering schoolie bite. Each bonus bout with small stripers is a step nearer the “start” of the season.
Email just prior to rains: Jay, still picking shorts & slots every morning on tiny plugs. Hope this New Year's blow doesn't muck things up much. Will keep pluggin away with these forecast temps. Been a big difference where the fish hold at the north end compared to the south end. TJ
(There has long been a subtle but detectable difference in the feel of fishing north and south LBI. I can’t nail it down but I think the north is inclined to wide swings in the action, with hot and cold often shoulder to shoulder. The south is a more predictable, slightly smaller-fished bite. When I fish north, I gear heavier. As all waveriders know, the northern half of the Island, particularly the heavy-impact stretch from North Beach to north Harvey Cedars, gets far-and-away the Island’s largest swells, some of the biggest waves on the entire Eastern Seaboard. J-mann)
WHY THE WARMTH BLOG: Every 50-degree inch toward that maximally distant spring is time well spent and fuel money well spent.
I’m among the cashers in, who spend a hefty chunk of every day in the wilds or along the beach or atop the water.
Sure, I have to portion in major stints of workage but I’m doubly lucky, being able to fit labor hours in early-day or very late. I bring all this up since I see up to 10 more days of outback exploration as we stay on the superior side of a growingly weird meteorological bubble.
You can’t help but momentarily noticing the bitter winter blasts damn-near annihilating the Midwest and the Rockies. Well, that arctic action is demarked by a line in the Midwest soil. To the west of the line, its bang the snow shovels slowly while on our east angle we are now barely approaching even October-like night temps with daily forays into the 50s. Those of an effervescent ilk are depicting us as being under a protective bubble of air.
How this bubble is -- on a daily, weekly and now monthly basis – keeping the East from the bitterness beast is now baffling even master meteorologists, not to mention us of rank amateur status. It is just a weirdly obstinate bubble, above and beyond anything seen, well, ever, thus record-breaking warmth in the Northeast.
There is a likely El Nino/NJ Warmth connection, some more energetic forecasters going so far as creating TV screen-shaped graphics of the Americas, South and North, with a colorful circle off the Peruvian coastline where “El Nino” hangs out when in town. The graphics then show this alley of mild air going up through Mexico and right up the east part of the Midwest corridor and into Canada. That flow from South of the Border is the hypothetical line in the sand blocking the bitterness from us.
El Nino works for most folks but I can’t help but wonder if this is a cart in front of the horse thing. And even though a lot can be said for rear-powered vehicles, it isn’t clear how El Nino has been in effect for decades, in an identical manner as now, but did not do what is now happening. What if, just maybe, it’s the high altitude goings on up here in the Northern Hemisphere that is causing El Nino to form? There may well be huger happenings in the Canada skies leading to of what’s going down in the Midwest and what’s staying up (temperatures) in the East.
Can we go through the entire winter without a cellar-solidifying freeze? Very, very unlikely, if based only on law of averages. Still, things are now officially in unexplored territory, historically speaking. Who knows where it will end up. Keep in mind, the cold is so close it would only take the slightest shift in the cosmos to inundate us with more winter than we care to hoist around until spring. Which brings up another Farmer’s Almanac-type point: Mild winters mean ferocious springtimes. Let’s hope the sky’s retaliation isn’t 50-year-storm-based.
Sunday, December 31, 2006: Waves: Small. Water clarity: Very good.
Schoolies by the double-digit numbers? Just what a couple anglers (boat and beach) had today. Not everyone, to be certain but there is enough potential out there to keep things going into 2007. There was a 34-incher caught yesterday in the surf. I think it was a clam bass.
BYE-BYE BLOG: And just like that, 2006 bows out, stirring no dust in its departure.
Being a forward-looking type, I restrict retro-glancing to this one transitional period when I replace my spent “Frogs of the World” calendar with the latest model.
If I had to offer some 2006 instant memorabilia, it would likely focus on the lack of anything spectacular.
The bassing, while not abysmal, was far from banner. The fluking was fairish, at best. The weakfishing was fairly kick-ass for many. The bluefishing was great if you were willing to settle for daily cocktails. In fact, the showing of blues in the 1- to 3-pound class was one of the better bites of 2006. Togging was decent but still showing signs of problems in the overall stocks. Sea bassing, while good, was actually down when compared to the bust-out years of 2004 and 2005. And, last but far from least, our in-progress schoolie showing – which began real early – has been steady and semi-stellar, with no signs of abating any time soon.
Notable near-no-shows included croakers, black drum, red drum and, aggravatingly, big fall bass.
Mullet run was a bit above average. Herring run was above-average.
Most memorable for me: late-October blitzes from Loveladies to Holgate, during which the thickest birdplay I have ever seen took place.
Biggest 2006 controversy was, far and away, the initial report of fluke cutbacks for 2007, threatening to drop the keeper count to maybe two fish at 16 inches or greater. Those Draconian cuttings were squelched primarily due to recreational outcries. However, what isn’t yet registering to many anglers is that seemingly decent 11-th hour fluke compromise will still mean grave cuts in fluking for 2007. And when they cut fluke, it usually mean surfcasters are out of luck.
Saturday, December 30, 2006: Waves: Small. Water clarity: Very clear.
Well, we’re only inches away from 2007 and the stripers aren’t checking the calendars. A number of surf casters and boat fishermen had plenty of stripers with a bit of an increase in average size. Those football bass in the 24- to 26-inch range – dare I say “slotfish”? – are showing, leading to anxious anglers grabbing for the tape. Hey, after you bring in loads of those micro-bass, a mid-20s (inches) striper looks kinda hefty.
There were so many people fishing today that I’m once again obligated to note that some surfside folks had shine-ola to show but there were plenty of hooking at the prime winter hotspots – and the same late-season areas seem to show year in and year out.
Boat report: “Jay -- quick boat report from Friday 12/29...took a charter of four out off Southern LBI and Brig in search of stripers. Captain did a bail job on stripers up to 20 lbs last week in the same spots but marked very little on the machine and three hours of fishing produced one short bass and a bunch of doggies -- all on the jig. … Michael”
Not unexpectedly, this will be the warmest December on the books, which go back over 100 years. Believe me, we will see some frigidity but we’re already closer to spring – and the days get longer daily.
While I repeatedly bandy about the Global Warming thing as the weird-warmth cause, I now have to throw in something call Global Dimming.
I’m serious – as is Global Dimming.
Did any of you see that amazing Nova show called “Dimming the Sun”? It’s scary and mesmerizing in one felled swoop. It tells the way our confounded pollution – including the likes of Contrails (vapor trails left behind by jet aircraft) – is shading the planet and actually keeping it cooler than Global Warming would prefer. Without the suspended particulates from pollution, leading to clouds (dark clouds), we’d likely already be in world of hurt from the damage we’ve done, leading to the Greenhouse Effect.
If you believe this stuff – and there’s not a lot of academic room to disbelieve it – we’re in a mess wrapped inside a messier mess.
For more on “Dimming the Sun” go to: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun.
Here’s a cool email regarding my cast-off Wildeye.
“Jay, I just read your post about the snapped-lure lost wildeye, and how far it went. Just as an FYI, here's some info I learned recently:
I build my own rods, and on a rod building message board recently this exact subject came up. The point of the post was that most fisherpersons don't realize how much of a drag, aerodynamically speaking, their lure or rig experiences as it travels through the air. I'm no physicist, but it seems that the two biggest factors applying braking forces to your casts are A) the weight of the line, and the effect gravity has on it (i.e. pulling the line down toward the center of the earth) and B) the line's inertia, its unwillingness to leave its comfy home on the spool of your Squidder (or 704z, as the case may be). A seasoned rod builder suggested that if you really want to see, firsthand, how much these forces shorten your casts, to break off your rig the next time you toss it. It will probably travel twice as far, because it doesn't have the line acting like a parachute as it flies through the air. The next time I was out, I did exactly that (unintentionally, of course), and watched in amazement as my Deadly Dick traversed an amazing parabola into the far heart of infinity. It was at least twice as far as I normally throw it (which is not very far). I found this insightful because what one would think would be the biggest limiting factor in casting - a lure's aerodynamic characteristics -- is not very important at all. Sure, a torpedo-shaped plug will cast farther than a square one, but the lure's shape isn't really what's holding back your casts -- it's the line.
Just thought you might find this interesting. I find this stuff fascinating, but then again I've always been a weirdo.... Cheers, Chris
Friday, December 29, 2006: waves: Very small. Water clarity: Too clear for low tide.
Just a quick stop-by in here as I have to cover a load of be-theres in a small space of time. That’s why I got an early start on the clamming grounds where I heard the raking action was picking up. Conroy, I know. Well, I sure didn’t find any easy pickin’ as I was forced into working the highly compacted grass roots to find my daily allotment. It was tough go but the clams were all small and perfect.
As I zipped off the beach from clamming, I saw a great looking trough and suddenly had this strange sense of being drawn to stopping and popping. An odd cosmic voice seemed to tell me all I had to do was cast out and it would be one of those first-cast-bass things. Well, I whipped out a decently long cast and Bam!!! No, no bass. I did manage to cast off a perfectly new Wildeye. I distinctly heard the cosmos chuckle to itself.
Oh, well, so much for strange striper sensations. But, have you ever noticed how far a cast-off rig can travel? That whip-lashed Wildeye wound up free-flying beyond the sandbar. I couldn’t properly cast it that far if I tried all day.
And some folks managed to keep plug on line today, finding a fairish following of bass in the Nevada zone. I hear pink was hot. This action seemed fairyl wide-spread and there was very significant fishing pressure as many of you seemed to make a two-ended weekend out of the holiday. A two-ended weekend is the famed Friday and Monday sandwich. I saw a couple tackle shops pretty damned packed.
STEAMING BLOG: Kids and clams: Perfect together. My little buddy JR, 3, of Surf City and Marlton is a fairly picky eater. During a recent holiday meal I steamed a batch of incredible Holgate clams. Despite assurances that JR would not even consider downing a clam, he tasted one and the race was on. That boy would have polished off the entire load. I mentioned that to a few folks and they had very similar reports of kids going gaga over steamers. I’m guessing it has a lot to go with the saltiness – or the kids just have good taste buds.
By the by, did you know that we naturally crave salt in order to get iodine, a mineral central to survival but one the human body cannot produce. Same thing goes for Vitamin C. No C -- no survive, scurvy dog. But the human body cannot produce C on its own so bring on a major craving for, maybe you guessed it, sugar. No, not that refined crap that can ruin our health but a nutritious craving for fruit sugar, which is always associated with Vitamin C.
Thursday, December 28, 2006: waves: Small. Water clarity: Fair.
Still bassin’ out there. A few fish were taken today by the few guys trying. Some of the bait-based bass were doubly tiny. Here’s an indicative email: “Hi Jay, went for my annual birthday plugging outing, water was a bit cleaner. Managed 8 shorties on very small plugs (plugs that my wife didn't know she got me for my birthday), lost a few others. Started hitting about 1-2 hours after dead low. I had to measure one because he was so small.....8 1/4"! TJ”
I had similar reports of miniscule stripers, all on bait. For the past few days, the close-to-keeper-sized stripers went for plugs or jigs. A.M. had a 33-inch keeper from boat, north of B.I.
Rips off Cape May are rippin’. If you have contacts down there go and cash in before the fish all head to the Carolinas.
Emails:
“Hi Jay,
I gave it a quick shot on the beach, South End, yesterday (12/27). Got a small bass on my first cast and nothing after that, I only had about a half hour to fish. I was using a small bucktail teaser followed by a Storm Shad. Happy New Year to you and all the other blog readers. Dave H.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Report from Handley crew: “Jay,
Gotta a report for you from Hatteras, NC. We haven't set the world on fire, but my brother and I both landed the largest fish we've ever caught from the surf on this trip. Christmas morning I fished Cape Point, NC and I landed a 6-7 foot dusky shark. It weighed over 100lbs. Later that afternoon my brother released another dusky that looked to be larger then the one I caught. Saw a sma
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