A bay kind of a day! - NJFishing.com Your Best Online Source for Fishing Information in New Jersey

Detour66 · #1 09-17-2024, 06:56 PM

Left the barn and was greeted to a outgoing tide and 8-15kt NE wind. Not much fun but it could have been worst! I decided to buy some clams today and attempt to catch pogies or whatever might decide to bite. We fished the usual leeward bay spot's plus some small pieces in the bay that I have had numbers too for years. We wound up catching porgies, spots, kingfish, croakers, sea bass, fluke, dogfish and a bunch to my surprise spike weakfish! Not a bad outing all considered. All fish were released. The weather wound up being sunny and it was a beautiful day! I'm glad we went out despite the east wind and cloudy forecast! There was lots of action and it was fun. The season is starting to wind down but there's still lots of fishing yet to come. Get out there if you can. You never know what you will catch! Tight Lines!

AndyS · #2 09-17-2024, 07:49 PM

Great report !

One of my entries in my fishing logbook that really sticks out was a surf report from September 11th, (and this is going back a few years) Weakfish in Bay Head at night, for 3 nights strait, spike weakfish on just about every cast !
They are around, but seemingly elusive.

Broad Bill · #3 09-17-2024, 08:14 PM

Nothing beats being on the water. This has been posted before but your post made me think of it. What's happening with spike weakfish is in my opinion exactly what's happening to a large degree with fluke. Every year, we see large schools of spike weakfish migrate past our coast which seem to disappear over the winter and never reappear in the spring. Shrimp draggers down south kill millions of these spike weakfish every year harvesting shrimp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUvgB6R1Xs0

The video focuses on summer flounder but skip to 2:42 of the video and witness the waste involved in the shrimp fishery from bycatch of weakfish, juvenile summer flounder and blue claw crabs. 4 lbs. of bycatch waste for every pound of shrimp harvested in North Carolina of which nothing is reported against North Carolina's quota. An estimated 60,000 lbs. of 3" juvenile summer flounder killed every year in the small mesh shrimp fishery. Think about how many millions of 3" fish it takes to catch 60,000 pounds a year. Listen to the entire video, it reflects the problem we're witnessing with many of today's fisheries.

Same problem exists today offshore with our local summer flounder with other small mesh fisheries targeting a variety of other ground fish. And it's about to get worse as management is considering changes to the rules regarding bycatch limits from small mesh netters and changes being pushed to expand the area small mesh netters can operate in and retain 200 lbs. of bycatch summer flounder per trip.

Detour66 · #4 09-17-2024, 08:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AndyS

Great report !

One of my entries in my fishing logbook that really sticks out was a surf report from September 11th, (and this is going back a few years) Weakfish in Bay Head at night, for 3 nights strait, spike weakfish on just about every cast !
They are around, but seemingly elusive.

They where not elusive today. We got them almost every drop. One that we caught was a few lbs. There are more out there than people realize including myself! They are cool to catch and give a good fight! Clam did the trick!