1. The fish come through every day at the perfect light level, they need light to find food, but of course donât like too much light. They will move through the shallow surf during the right light levels-just after dawn and just before dusk. This cruise-through pattern is a certainty. You can expect them to move through solo or in groups up to 20, most of the time 2-6 fish move through, sometimes within a few feet of one another.
2. The fish will be looking for the silhouettes and color flashes of the baits they have been feeding on. Most just slowly cruise around all the time, every now and then they stop to hold on some kind of structure and eat any bait that happens to be there.
3. If they donât get fed, the bass will not stay in the surf, and they will only pass by once, giving you only a 2 or 3-minute window to put the lure in front of a fish. What this means is you have to keep your lure on the water during the entire right light level to increase your chances of a bass seeing your lure. If they encounter bait and eat, they may spend the whole dawn or dusk feeding shallow, and if the bait is plentiful, then yes, they will be there all night or day, but if not they will just quickly pass by.
4. Depending on what theyâre feeding on the strike zone differs. If they are on fluke or crabs then offerings presented close to the bottom will produce best, but if they are on upper water column bait like mullet, surface plugs or sliders or sub-surface sinking plugs will produce best. Also, when mullet or tinker mackerel or any other larger schools of bait are present the bass will not waste energy chasing healthy bait. They will either wait in rip holes or on structure to ambush healthy baits or they will simply slowly cruise through looking for injured baits-it just so happens a splashing surface plug can mimic an injured
baitfish 100%.
5. Casting 3 times or more to the same zone of water is a waste of time. I imagine the surf as a piano keyboard, and cast once or twice to every key, the black keys are a good model of how the bass may be spread out in the surf, and thus the white keys a representation of where I place my casts as I slowly walk down the beach. Remember the right light level is a short span of time. The surf is a piano of possibilities.
6. In Jersey there is no such thing as too shallow. The bass will pursue baits even when their bellies are rubbing on the sand and their backs are out of the water. Most of my surf strikes occur in less than 18âs of water, furthermore I seem to always have better luck at lower stages of tide or when Iâm fishing âdry at lowâ flats flooded during the higher stages of tide.
7. Rips, structure, current seams will gather bait and create ambushing points; I will fish these areas more thoroughly, because unlike cruising bass, the fish may not come off these points at all to chase your lure.
8. Water clarity is very important, if you had the choice to stand in a fog cloud or to move to where the air was clear and you could breathe better and you could see a t-rex coming to eat you what would you do? Is it easier to pick berries from thorny vines when you can see or when you canât see? The only reason bass will stay in the cloudy water is if there is bait and they are eating it.
9. Natural Finish vs. Crazy colored finish. Natural vibration vs. unnatural vibration (use natural lure pattern). Last summer in super-clear water I had a large bass slowly come to the top of a wave to inspect my lure, she poked her nose right up the lure and turned away, when I twitched the plug again she came back up and repeated the process then disappeared when the wave broke. I was throwing a pearl creek chub 1900, a lure that has been a top producer of bigger fish, however Iâm convinced had I been throwing a plug with a realistic finish, like a yozuri mag mullet popper, or rapala x-rap mullet, the bigger more experienced fish wouldnât have hesitated and I would have gotten bit. I had the same thing happen with a couple pencil poppers all up and down the stretch of beach the days prior and after. I simply did not have a truly realistic mullet shaped and painted popper and I only went 1 for 7 over a 3 day stretch of many nice fish being present and actively inspecting but not hitting my lure. Jersey bass have all been hooked under the lights once or twice, and they all know what itâs like to be caught and they all are big and smart-for bass. As far as vibration, I like having loud lures and quiet lures as it takes very little vibration for them to find your lure in 0 visibility and a lot of times I think the lures that donât vibrate take bigger smarter fish because they sound more like real baitfish. So in my opinion, having real-sounding and looking lures is essential.
10. The most important thing to do is cover water. You could cover 2 miles of beach before you find the fish, remember the surf is a piano; the keys representing the casting pattern…The fish seem to always be within earshot of each other because there are two things the fish follow. The first is bait, and the second is the sound of one another. In my mind they just roll around either schooled up or within earshot of each other. Either following baitfish or moving from one food source to next, they must have evolved those stripes for a reason. I think itâs for schooling. Either way the fish will be in the same zones and you have to find them, so once you do the probability of more fish being around is high.
So if you know me, then Iâve probably talked your ear off about how this kind of summer time surf bassing is my favorite kind of fishing. Nothing beats surf casting easy to cast lures, in clear water with moderate breaking waves and seeing a 20lb bass swim up into a cresting wave to nail your top-water for a perfect âaquarium take.â In mid-summer, the back bay temps have risen to usually the mid 70âs and the fish have moved into the surf zone for the same reason a trout moves into the riffles in summer, because the sloshing air through the water in the breaking waves gives a small, but needed boost in oxygen content, this draws bass into the waves like a magnet.
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