The Perils of Blitz Chasing
I barely even noticed the traffic leading to the George Washington Bridge as I crawled down I-95 with a truck full of surf gear and a head full of striper dreams. The GPS estimated my arrival—accounting for the gridlock—at TAK Waterman Surf n Fish at a gentlemanly 10:30 a.m. That would give me plenty of time to track down the bite that had set the striper-fishing community abuzz over the last four days.
The waters off Monmouth County had become a veritable soup of menhaden, from 6-inch “walnuts” to full-fledged adults up 14 inches in length. A passing school of southbound stripers had taken notice, and the anglers there to witness this collision of bass and bait called it a blitz for the ages.
The term “blitz” was coined by one of surfcasting’s greatest scribes, Frank Woolner, who served as a military correspondent during World War II, and adapted some of that vernacular to his writing about fishing. He perfectly defines a striper blitz in The Complete Book of Striped Bass Fishing, which he co-authored with Hal Lyman in 1954.
“In surf casting jargon, a ‘blitz’ is defined as a period of magnificent striper fishing—a half-hour, an hour, or even a whole tide in which bass compete with each other for the dubious honor of smashing at natural or artificial baits tossed into the hissing brine. This happens when the complex chemistry of marine life and the elements is happily mixed, subtly blended, and served up in one grand riot of teeming bait, screaming birds, and frantically feeding fish.”
The previous afternoon, while gathering intel on the blitz, I talked with TAK co-founder Mike Gleason, who’d caught multiple 30-pound fish during a brief lunch break from the shop. With an ocean full of fish and 36 hours to do nothing but cast at the water’s edge, how could I miss?
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A post-mortem of the trip would cite a building south wind, a warming trend, and the folk wisdom that “they just can’t eat all the time” as the reason the blitz abruptly ended. On my ride back to Massachusetts, after scratching up only a couple schoolies, I was acutely aware of the traffic, grinding my teeth and leaning on the horn while I tried to banish the trip from my mind—especially the last ditch effort.
I’d been leaning over the boardwalk in Long Branch, watching a school of bunker move about, unbothered by predators, when another fishermen approached to commiserate over the slow fishing. I mentioned that I’d driven six hours just to re-learn one of fishing’s oldest maxims, “I shoulda been there yesterday,” and the other angler offered some advice.
“Before you go,” he advised, you might want to check out Lot G on Sandy Hook. Sometimes there’s action out there when everywhere else is slow.”
If you’ve spent any time fishing Sandy Hook, then you already know where this is going. A six-mile long sand spit forming the barrier between Atlantic Highlands and the ocean, Sandy Hook is rife with bars, bowls, and rips, which fill up, at various parts of the season, with stripers, fluke, and albies. It’s also home to the largest nude beach in the Northeast, right at Lot G.
All I caught that day was an eyeful of naturalists tanning their nether-regions in the late-October sunshine. It was a potent reminder of the dangers of chasing after so-called legendary blitzes, unsubstantiated reports, and unsolicited advice—a reminder I’ll surely forget next time the surfcasting rumor mill churns out something I simply can’t ignore.
If we surf fishermen are nothing else, we’re optimists, with our glass-half-full mentalities driving every cast into Woolner’s “hissing brine.” That quality may set us on a wild goose chase now and then, but in the end, laying bare (pun intended) our biggest misses makes for better stories than boasting about our greatest hits—even though that won’t yet be evident while you’re stuck in traffic in Fort Lee.
Watch a Video of the Trip Below
Source: https://onthewater.com/the-perils-of-blitz-chasing
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