Color the Bay BLUE

Bluefish are in the Bay, big time.  I have been getting them in the boat and today I decided to really look around the mid Bay from the shore.  I hit a number of locations.  In every spot, I spotted schools of bluefish with my binoculars working way out. In some instances the schools were the size of a football field, and there were few boaters after them.

From shore I found one particular spot that had good numbers of smaller ones in close feasting on huge schools of bay anchovies. These were what I would call skipjacks, or blues in the 8-12 inch range (see photo at left).  I caught a number of them on small bucktail jigs.  In the same location, there were bigger blues breaking out far for peanut bunker.  As sunset approached, these bigger ones came closer to shore where I was able to catch them with a long cast with a Kastmaster XL (see photo at right). I saw only one boat working the bigger fish out far.

You would have to go back 10 or 15 years to find a comparable year to this year's bluefish activity. It has been exceptionally good.  Boat fishing is a sure bet right now while shore fishermen will have to do a little exploring to find the fish.

Birds and small blues are feasting on schools of bay anchovies.