Fishing Report: 10/24/2010

Another week of excellent fall fishing in our area. Beautiful weather, bass into the 20's and bluefish up to 18 pounds, endless streams of bait moving down the coast. And the main body of stripers hasn't even arrived yet! If the weather cooperates, it's going to be a fall to remember.

We mixed it up a bit on trips during the first part of the week, spending part of the time trolling along the state park and part of the time drifting live bait in the inlet and back bay. While we did find a couple of bass on the troll, the big story was bluefish with some real jumbos prowling the beachfront last week. In fact, on Wednesday's trip the smallest blue to come over the side was in the 12 pound class and several tipped the scales at 18+ pounds. Trolling Maja spoons and Stretch plugs did most of the damage as the fish weren't schooled up enough to jig for them quite yet.

As usual for October, drifting live spot in the inlet area produced most of the bass this week with about a 50/50 mix of keepers and shorts. It's been a bit quiet in the back channels so far, but I'd expect that to change this week with the water temps finally dropping into the 50's and the full moon behind us. Things did slow down a bit on yesterday's trip. Not too sure whether it was the full moon and crystal clear night, the acres and acres of large herring that were right outside the inlet the past few days, or some combination of the two. Whatever it was, the bass around the inlet were apparently not in a feeding mood yesterday so we switched over to playing mostly catch and release with the blackfish that are so abundant on the rocks right now. We'll be back to bass tomorrow.

So the bait pens are full, the main body of fish is on it's way down to us, and the weather has been looking promising. It's going to be a great fall. I do still have a couple of dates open the week of November 15th, so now's the time to get that final trip of 2010 scheduled.