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| The bay anchovies have arrived in big numbers. They are small now, less than an inch in size, but there are tons of them. They will light up the fishing! |
Things are looking up along the oceanfront. I mean REALLY looking up. The most positive news in a long time is that huge schools of bay anchovies are moving along the oceanfront shoreline. This bait makes things happen. The bait has drawn in fluke, bluefish and schoolies as we see a preview of fall developing.I went down today to check out shore fishing with my son Jon. I was tipped off that this was happening from my brother Steve who is on vacation at the oceanfront. We found huge schools of bay anchovies as far as the eye could see. I also saw loads of snapper blues and big numbers of larger bait that I could not identify. Terns were diving and fish were occasionally breaking, but they were fussy.
We ended up catching good numbers of fluke on bucktail jigs fished under the bait and good numbers of blues on Kastmaster XLs. I also saw a number of schoolies break water but they would not hit. The water was calm and there was just too much bait to fool the finicky schoolies.
I believe we are seeing an early fall preview of what's to come. While the shore fishing has been very poor this summer, it will have no bearing on what will happen this fall. I suspect that barring any big storms these big schools of bay anchovies will light up the fishing for stripers, blues and false albacore. Only a matter of time and cooler weather.
