I grew up fishing Sandy Hook, Shark River and the Manasquan River for winter flounder. Every year in the '70s early to mid '80s those bodies of water were absolutely paved with flounder ranging in sizes from small to jumbos. You could follow the schools as they came out of the mud to drop their eggs and start they're migration from the bays to the inlets or ocean and begin their offshore migration east. In the Atlantic Highlands, the start of the season was marked by the party boats fishing around the Quay, back bays areas and flats. Then you'd follow the schools as they started schooling up and moving out. Channels, areas around Earle, then it moved closer to the mussel beds at Flynn's Knoll and Roamers Shoals and as Skolman mentioned they poured into the ocean staging at the Cedars for a few weeks to feed up before their long journey offshore. You could catch all the jumbo flounder and big ling you wanted at the Cedars for a few weeks before the blue fish and stripers showed and the flounder immediately headed for Dodge. That was the ritual every year, year in year out, and it wouldn't be unusual to catch 40 or 50 flounder in a day's time from shore without using chum. Like the ling and whiting fishery, fast forward to the late 80's when the commercial fishery started targeting winter flounder after the summer flounder fishery crashed. All you need to do is look at catch levels in the 80's and 90's, larger species were targeted offshore, spawning stock was destroyed, recruitment went from 60 million new fish introduced into the stock every year to less than 5 million today and a biomass crashed. That fishery has been irreparably damaged and it's not coming back. We're staring down the barrel of a gun right now with the same thing happening to the summer flounder fishery and for those of you that don't think that's possible believe me nobody thought the winter flounder fishery could be destroyed in the 60's, 70's and early to mid 80's but it was. No one believed even more so the ling and whiting fishery that we had which was absolutely off the charts incredible could be destroyed and it was as well. Both of these fisheries were destroyed within a relatively short period of time. With the technology in place back then and even more so today, it only takes a few years to wipe out a stock and decades for it to recover, if it's even at all possible.