The Jersey Blues

 

    At least once a year, I like the stumble upon a good jetty bluefish bite. Very few things in fishing compare well to the carnage that happens when a school of bluefish come through and the most effective lure in the spread simply becomes the one that you can throw at them quick enough. At Barnegat Inlet the other day, the wind was ripping from the South-East at about a billion knots and the fluke bite was pretty much non-existent. I got a small blue on a fluke bucktail and mistakenly thought that the school had arrived, but my next few casts bore no fruit and I was proven wrong, simply driven back to first base.

    I walked further down to the tip of the jetty, where I had access to not only the ripping current of the inlet side but also a shoal of rocks on the open ocean. When I arrived, there was a line of anglers crowded along the tip, with one guy consistently picking off bluefish on plugs by casting into the whitewater in that shoal. I threw a diamond jig at first, the only lure that could cut through the crosswind just by the quality of being a solid chunk of metal. However, I threw that around for about 15 minutes with no bites and I believe that picky bluefish are a myth, so I tried a few more plugs then switched back to fluking. 

    Making bottom contact with such a cross-wind soon proved to be a monumental task and so I was cursed with the Jersey blues. I switched back to the diamond jig as the wind died down and the tide went out, creating a small belt of whitewater along the edge of a rocky shoal where all the bluefish stacked up in. I started catching them every cast on the metal. Most of them were smaller fish, but still fought like the possessed little yellow-eyed demons that they are. 

    A limit was soon put together, and I began to catch and release fish or otherwise give them to a Mexican family that was also lined up on the tip of the jetty. I tried to break the language barrier and ask them for bluefish recipes but my communication was poor and this was unsuccessful, making Spanish just one more thing I need to learn. 

    

    While the blues that myself and the people around me were pulling in averaged around a pound, I soon got a thump on a metal jig that felt much heavier. This fish pulled drag and I had to fight it around several large jetty rocks before I got it close enough to see that it was the nicest bluefish I had laid eyes on all day. I climbed down the rocks, wearing jetty cleats, and waiting for a wave to powerwash some whitewater over the jetty so I could pull up him up, ending with my personal best bluefish in hand. 

    That fish was released as my limit was already established and a big bluefish like that would have a filet that was more bloodline than light meat. After I landed that fish, several other inlet anglers immediately rushed over and started hurling metals and plugs over where I was standing, which I took as a sign to head out, following the lighthouse back to the parking lot with the satisfactory weight of a full fish cooler slung over my shoulder, taking the opposite path of decades of boat travel. 

    The summer's begun, it flows in like sunrays that permeated through the windows on my drive home and lit up the scent of salt and the sound of gulls. My hands felt properly torn and salt-coated too.  Beautiful little vagrantries.