summer flatfish
- Thread starter greg setter
- Start date
Let's get back to flounder fishing here boys. One of the interesting things about Barnegat Inlet and Barnegat Bay and that general vicinity is big difference between tides and tidal currents. I am sure that others experience similar phenomena, but for those of you inlander's that never venture upon the salt you may find that this doesn't seem to make sense. Often the tidal current is out of sync with the actual tide by 2-3 hours. So in other words, while the tide is rising(or vice-versa), the current is till pushing out into the ocean. A couple of weeks ago while I was out it was 3 hours into the rising tide before the current turned around and started heading back into the bay. You can actually pretty easily tell the tide height in an area you are familiar with by the water level at landmarks. Lately it has been about 1-1/2 to 2 hours difference on the rising tide. There is a really great chapter on tides in "The Fisherman's Ocean" by David Ross if you are interested in this. But the bottom line is that tide is a measure of rise and fall of water levels and currents are the flow of water. And while we often talk about the incoming and outgoing tides, the real names are flood and ebb, which are really about height, while the former are really about currents.
So where I am gong with this is water clarity, especially when we have had the weather patterns I mentioned earlier that dump a lot of drain water and runoff into the bay and tends to make the water dirty. I have learned to watch the current graph's in conjunction with the tide tables to figure out when will be the best time to fish. Yesterday afternoon I left work a little early to go down the Long Beach Island and look for a weekly rental, and figured that since I was there I might just as well do a little fishing. I headed out about 5:30, and although low tide was a couple of hours prior to that the current had just turned around. It was about 6:30 before the water started to clear up. What is kind of cool is that you can see it coming through the inlet if you are close enough and when that water gets to you you can see the difference almost instantly. And it is often like flipping a light switch, as soon as the clear water hits you the flounder start to feed. Last night was just like that, I did not get a hit in the first 45 minutes to an hour and the water was brown and turbid and you really couldn't see down more than a foot. When the ocean water came in, it was a green-blue and you could see down easily about 3 feet. The first time I dropped in the clear water I had a fish on within a couple of minutes.
And then around 7:30 something else happened and the bite pretty much shut down-some heavy cloud cover moved in and darkened everything considerably, and the fishing was maybe not over, but the action slowed by about 80%. I was catching 2 or 3 on every drift of about a 1/2 mile before the clouds moved in and that dropped to maybe one per drift and sometimes none after that.
So where I am gong with this is water clarity, especially when we have had the weather patterns I mentioned earlier that dump a lot of drain water and runoff into the bay and tends to make the water dirty. I have learned to watch the current graph's in conjunction with the tide tables to figure out when will be the best time to fish. Yesterday afternoon I left work a little early to go down the Long Beach Island and look for a weekly rental, and figured that since I was there I might just as well do a little fishing. I headed out about 5:30, and although low tide was a couple of hours prior to that the current had just turned around. It was about 6:30 before the water started to clear up. What is kind of cool is that you can see it coming through the inlet if you are close enough and when that water gets to you you can see the difference almost instantly. And it is often like flipping a light switch, as soon as the clear water hits you the flounder start to feed. Last night was just like that, I did not get a hit in the first 45 minutes to an hour and the water was brown and turbid and you really couldn't see down more than a foot. When the ocean water came in, it was a green-blue and you could see down easily about 3 feet. The first time I dropped in the clear water I had a fish on within a couple of minutes.
And then around 7:30 something else happened and the bite pretty much shut down-some heavy cloud cover moved in and darkened everything considerably, and the fishing was maybe not over, but the action slowed by about 80%. I was catching 2 or 3 on every drift of about a 1/2 mile before the clouds moved in and that dropped to maybe one per drift and sometimes none after that.