To avoid excessive boat wakes, try the channel just inside the inlet where it doglegs past the lighthouse, then does a 180-degree turn and heads back north, passing the dike. The fluke are numerous and often quite big here, especially at the dogleg, where the tides wash huge volumes of water to and from the bay. Use your seawater temperature gauge to locate the warm water and stay with it as the tides wash back and forth.

If the boat traffic is too extreme, try Double Creek Channel. There's less water here, but shallow-draft boats can manage it. The fishing can be quite good at the top of the tide on the west side of the dike, which is a manmade sandy finger created from dredge spoils.

Inside the bay, deep flats stretch from the BB marker off Forked River, the BI marker off Waretown Creek and the No. 42 marker off Barnegat. These areas are well known for giving up plenty of fluke.

Just aimlessly drifting will not be as productive as making careful drifts over the deep basins, dropoffs and along the shoals that are clearly marked on the NOAA Small-Craft Chart No. 12324. The bottom along the three markers has no severe changes in bottom structure, so look for those subtle changes where the bottom changes by two or three feet.

LITTLE EGG HARBOR & GREAT BAY Little Egg Harbor and Great Bay are next-door neighbors, separated by the incredible vitality of expansive marshes just inside Little Egg Harbor Inlet. Narrow channels and deep thoroughfares slice through the sedges, which create natural highways for bait and fluke to commute to their daily lives of hiding and feeding.

One terrific fluke spot is the channel that runs north from the inlet along the backside of Long Beach Island, and then makes a westward dogleg at Mordecai Island behind Beach Haven.

The bottom here is very confused. The jumble of sandbars and dropoffs are well-known hotspots for summer flounder.

A few hundred yards to the west is another good spot -- the dogleg marked by the red 4 buoy. The channel curve creates sandbars, shoals and dropoffs that consistently hold lots of bait, like spearing and bay anchovies.

Of course, the area also holds lots of summer flounder.

Looking to the south of Little Egg Harbor, the beautiful marshes offer some incredible opportunities for shallow-draft skiffs to fish the many deep fingers intruding between the sedge islands. Once you hop over the shallow flats at the edge of the sedges, you can fish the cuts in water as deep as 15 feet and catch fluke like nobody's business.

Try the deep channels between Middle and Hither islands, and between Hither and Story islands.

The very deep Marshelder Channel can also be superb. But it gets a lot of boat traffic and is a better bet on weekdays when fewer boats are around.

The Mullica River feeds Great Bay, and the bay is blessed with a myriad of ever-changing channels that lead through pristine marshes toward Little Egg Inlet. The shoals and channels around Seven Islands and Fish Island are popular, as is the area known as the Stakes just off the main channel.