Manasquan River 9-16

[Pauls1976]

It was too nice to sit idle, decided to fish the river for end of high tide and beginning of our going. Pulled right out front of marina. Immediately had 2 fish on, both keepers but one shook the hook before we got the net to other side of boat. Continued to make the same short drift. Got fish on every drift. Got 4 keepers in the boat between 19-21”, dropped 2 boat side that we saw, a load of shorts and had a few good ones on but never got a look at them. Hopefully, these fish will be around until next saturday. Fish were all caught on bucktails and teasers, equal split on teaser and bucktail, no preference in colors or gulp vs bait. Probably burned less than 5 gallons of gas today.

[Billfish715]

The "mass migration" out of the river is a little late this year. Somehow they must know to wait until the season is over before they move out. We haven't had any really severe temperature drops or strong storms to push them out of the back. There's still too much bait around in the river to force them out. In years gone by, there has always been a short window of opportunity for fishing for fluke along the beach or close in after they move out. Once they start to move out, they travel pretty fast and far in a short time, based on some tagging data.

The fluke move out in patches or groups or pods or whatever you want to call them. They don't seem to spread out along the way offshore, so you can be just a quarter of a mile away from a big batch of fluke and not catch anything. You'd swear there were no more fluke in the ocean. The fact is, they were all in one spot. If you can find that one big body of migrating fluke before the trawlers do, you can have a ball.

There aren't too many places where you could have fished and thank you for sharing your story. If "Foggy" is reading this, I know where he'll be this week.

[Skolmann]

I fished off the wall on the Pt. Pleasant side yesterday from about 12-4. Caught a nice 24.5”/#5.41 fluke within the first 20 minutes. Caught 4 others all around 17”. Saw only one other keeper caught but did see a decent amount of 15-17.5” fluke caught. Everything I caught came on killies.

[foggy notion]

Fished the Manasquan River last Thursday. We boated (22) fluke with my legal fluke being a 20" and a 26" fluke (personal river best this season). The short fluke were in the shallow waters, with the larger fluke being in the deeper spots. It's nice to fish the river at this time of the season as there are minimal boats around.

[teddysclaw]

ya'll think this is the same for the other rivers? I.e. Shark River/Navesink River? Thought the rivers would be dead by now, didn't realize there was a migration out of the rivers at this time of the year.

Can someone explain how this works? I notice early on, most of the fluke come into the rivers and shallows. As the summer progresses, they leave the rivers and shallows and I don't seem to catch too many after July in the rivers. I was under the assumption that THIS was the time they leave the rivers (Late July). So if the flatties tend to leave the rivers mid summer, where are these fish leaving the river coming from?

[Jay F]

9-15 Fished Shrewsbury river for 1hour after crabbing and nailed a 6lbs fluke.

[Rocky]

9-15 Fished Shrewsbury river for 1hour after crabbing and nailed a 6lbs fluke.

One heck of a haul there Jay.

[NJ219bands]

9-15 fished shrewsbury river for 1hour after crabbing and nailed a 6lbs fluke.
wow