Frost Fish

[Reel Class]

Great article. I remember as a very young kid in the late 70's my neighbors down the street coming to our house with buckets of BIG whiting mixed with some mackerel. This was after thanksgiving and the bluefish had chased them right on the beach and they just were left there. People would go up and literally pick them out of the sand much like how bunker get washed up on the beach after a blitz.

We've been seeing some whiting the last few years during spring seabass season. Some trips, on certain spots, we see no more than a few and they're usually spikes but we had a couple this past spring that were actually OK sized, but compared to the fish we used to see, these were small.

The last time I was on a whiting TRIP was in 1994 on the NK3. We went up to the Farms and we did OK. That particular trip was in late april/early may. In my memory, that was the last year that there was a viable fishery especially for the magic hour boats targeting whiting. In the 80's, fishing was still good and all the boats did either half-night whiting trips or magic hour trips.