Big bluefish like this one will test your tackle to its limit when hooked while fishing the surf. So hang on and have fun! Photo by Milt Rosko

I love to fish for stripers and blues anytime, but especially during the fall when these two great game fish begin feeding ravenously. This is the time of year when both species are adding bulk and fat to tide them over the long winter to come.

But there's only one dilemma I'm constantly confronted with: Where to go? There are so many ports of call and stretches of beach that provide superb fishing in New Jersey that I often wish I could be at several places at one time. This is especially true when conditions are right, with moderate sea conditions, huge concentrations of forage species, and weather that is absolutely delightful.

While sea conditions and weather play a role, what really turns me on during the fall is the exodus of forage species from coastal bays and rivers. Forage such as menhaden, herring, mullet, bay anchovies, hickory shad and spearing that were hatched early in summer in the protected estuaries now reach the ocean. There they are suddenly confronted with a quandary that didn't exist earlier: schools of hungry stripers and bluefish awaiting their migration.

Until you've experienced the mass migration of baitfish, it's difficult to comprehend its magnitude. There aren't hundreds or thousands of baitfish, but often literally millions of 3- to 8-inch-long fry swimming nervously in tightly packed schools. They appear like a black cloud in the water. What is certain to give any angler an adrenaline rush is to experience the conflict that occurs when schools of baitfish meet schools of stripers and blues.

Join me as we visit six great Jersey locations, three great areas for the surfcasting gentry, and three for boat-fishing enthusiasts.

RARITAN BAY
Raritan Bay is a broad expanse of water, an ideal nursery ground fed by the fresh water of the Raritan River. It is a nursery ground beyond comprehension, with miles of extremely shallow flats, and a major shipping channel crisscrossing the waterway.

What I like most about this waterway is the fact you can choose the tackle and technique that suit your fancy as you pursue stripers and blues. Unquestionably, the most exciting fishing occurs when hungry bass and blues are herding schools of forage, particularly peanut bunker. When this happens you've got Mother Nature on your side because gulls and terns will fill the air, screaming and diving, attacking the forage from the sky. The hapless fry are being attacked on the surface most often by blues, while the stripers hang deep, picking up the pieces mutilated by the sharp teeth of the blues. It's a lost cause for most of the peanut bunker!

But what a great opportunity to use a popping outfit or one-handed spinning rig and to toss popping plugs, surface-swimming plugs or plastic shad into the maelstrom of birds, feeding fish and hapless baitfish. The swim shad have been extremely effective the past couple of seasons, but you better bring a dozen of them with you, for by the end of a day the blues will have destroyed them all. It's the kind of fishing I wait all season for, and the beauty part of it all is that it takes place in the protected water of Raritan Bay (and the adjoining Sandy Hook Bay), where even in the severest northeaster you're still able to fish.