DELAWARE BAY
While to the north of Raritan Bay many stripers will head into the Hudson River to spend the winter, down on the broad expanse of Delaware Bay striped bass are congregating and feeding heavily prior to moving up into the Delaware River for the winter. Delaware Bay experiences the last major surge of boat action for Garden State anglers, with the best of the fishing often being from November through December.

Among the most popular techniques is fishing the rips with live eels. On an ebbing tide, forage from the river is carried into the bays, and then runs the gamut from the typical forage species, including menhaden, mullet, herring and spearing, along with blue crabs and grass shrimp. Unlike Raritan Bay, where there are extensive shallows, in lower Delaware Bay, the water's deeper, and with the varying bottom configurations, there are rips galore where stripers and blues take up station to feed on the forage carried to them by the current.

My favorite rig for this fishing is little more than a three-way swivel, with a 36-inch-long piece of 30-pound-test fluorocarbon leader material snelled to a 7/0 claw- or beak-style hook or a 9/0 or 10/0 circle hook. To the remaining eye of the swivel, tie in a 12-inch-long piece of 20-pound-test monofilament, and then tie a surgeon's loop onto which you slip a bank-style sinker. Depending on the flow of the current, you'll usually get by with 1 to 3 ounces of sinker weight, although when the current's ripping, you may have to double that weight.

With live eels it's simply a matter of placing the hook through the eel's eye sockets or lips, and lowering it to the bottom, and drifting through the rips. If there's a hungry linesider waiting for dinner, it'll inhale the eel in an instant.

Ranging from Fortescue down through the Bay Shore Channel and then out into the open ocean, you'll find stripers on North, Middle and Round shoals, especially during the late fall migration. Here, too, as schools of forage migrate, you'll often be rewarded with exciting surface action. Keep an alert eye for working gulls and terns, and in late fall you'll often witness the exciting dive-bombing antics of gannets feeding, a sure sign that stripers and blues are below. Then it's time to break out the casting tackle, using poppers and swimming plugs if the fish are breaking on bait, or probe the depths with a leadhead jig and pork rind combo.

Trolling is an option, too, with many fine big bass landed on swimming plugs and bunker spoons sent into the depths with wire line.

There can, however, be dismal days or nights in the midst of the fall migrations of stripers and blues. Given the choice, I'll take the hour before first light until sunup as unquestionably the best time to catch fish. Most often you're the first on the scene, whether from shore or boat, and this in itself boosts your chances of catching fish, especially when coupled with the propensity of both species to feed heavily at this time.