When purchasing ready-made rigs or tying your own, remember to keep things simple. The best rigs for summer flounder usually don't feature a lot of hardware.

All you'll need is a three-way swivel, maybe a single spinner blade or a flashy bead. Avoid rigs with a lot of Christmas-tree ornaments.

Over the past several years, back-bay baits too have become simplified. The traditional squid strip and live or freshly dead bait combo is being replaced with a single live killie.

For trophy-sized fluke, sharpies are using slivers of salmon or snapper bluefish belly because they are oily and so full of natural scent.

For fake baits, Berkley Gulp! is a good choice especially the swimming minnow in pink or chartreuse, or shrimp or sandworm imitations.

Soft-plastic tails draped on a leadhead or bucktail jig are gaining in popularity. Shad, curlytail and jerk- bait tails are terrific for fluke, especially when jigged off the bottom in short hops. Make an underhand cast a few yards away from the boat and lift the rod tip repeatedly to make your plastic bait hop along the bottom.

When fishing plastic, there's no drop-back. The fluke will whack it like A-Rod belting out another home run.

Fish your soft-plastics and bucktails along channel edges, marsh edges, cuts in sandy shoals, at the mouths of salt creeks, in rips, deep holes and at dropoffs where points of land jut into the bay waters.

When shallow jigging gets few bites, try casting out and away from the boat. Retrieve the leadhead in short hops, at slow to moderate speed.

To achieve maximum sensitivity, use a braided line. It has no stretch, great strength and a very small diameter to cut through water.

When using braided line, you'll feel every tap, tap of as a fluke mouths the bait. You'll also get down to the bottom with less weight.

SANDY HOOK BAY
The crown jewel of Gateway National Recreation Area is the thin peninsula known as Sandy Hook. The west side of the park stretches from Plum Island, at the mouth of the Shrewsbury River, past Horseshoe Cove on up to the tip of the Hook. Here you'll find a beautiful blend of sandy beaches, marshes, coves and sandbars.

A favorite local hotspot, known as Officers' Row because of the several stately buildings dating back to 1893 and used through WW II, parallels a dropoff from 7 to 20 feet.

This area holds plenty of fluke all season. At high tide, work close to the shore, then move to the drop as the tide ebbs.

Horseshoe Cove, another good spot, has lots of up-and-down bottom structure, including an 18-foot hole that gives up big fluke in July. The outside edge of the cove's sandy bottom falls off from 3 to 8 feet, and then down to 20 feet deep.