Raritan river 9/17/15:

[Eskimo]

Originally Posted by Mark B.

Some are young-of-the-year American Shad, no doubt.

The other evening, on the Delaware River, I caught 8 smallies (7 – 19”) on a Rapala Skitter Pop (shad pattern).

I got a question. I attached a pic. There were tens of thousand of these fish in the Delaware.
I assumed they were alewife, but I'm thinking maybe they're young-of-the-year shad. What do you make of this?
When one of those huge schools of fish move under your boat, the fishing just stops dead. I suspect it's because the predators can't sense your lure with all the noise created by a huge school of bait fish.