There are also many fish along the sedge islands that border Oyster Creek Channel, where drifting live eels, spot or chunks of menhaden or herring often produce.

SANDY HOOK TO SHARK RIVER
Beautiful beaches and myriad rock jetties provide surfcasters with great opportunities from Sandy Hook to Shark River. As baitfish vacate the bays and rivers, beginning with the mullet in September, the bass will follow.

At times, this becomes an around-the-clock fishery. But in looking back over a lifetime of fishing this area, I’ve settled on a pattern, preferring to get on the beach an hour before first light. Often I experience superb fishing between then and shortly after the sun comes up.

You’ve got to put in the time. Simply select an area of the coast, study the beaches and rockpiles, and concentrate in one area -- such as from the Hook to Monmouth Beach, or the jetty country from Long Branch to Shark River. I’ve known many anglers who waste more time during the fall racing up and down the coastal roads looking for fish, or listening to cell-phone chatter. That results in lots of driving and little else.

I’ve been particularly successful by fishing to a pattern: When I score with a nice catch of bass or blues, and there’s been no drastic change in the weather, I try to be at the same location the next day -- usually an hour later because of the tide difference.

Success usually continues until an offshore wind switches to the northeast with 25-knot winds, which just messes up everything.

I especially enjoy fishing from the jetties at night, when I find fewer other anglers.

For this kind of fishing, an excellent lure is a wooden surface-swimming metal-lipped plug. I’ve found color doesn’t matter much, but a slow retrieve is extremely important. It’s tough to discipline a slow retrieve, since you want the plug just wobbling along on the surface.

Cast directly east over the tumbled rocks on the jetties. Probe each corner and the pockets where rocks meet the sand.

This doesn’t mean that wooden metal-lips are the only way to go. While night-fishing, I’ve scored very well with rigged eels, soft-plastic swim shads and deep-running swimming plugs. I don’t change lures a lot, often carrying just what I need in a fishing vest.

I see far too many anglers wasting their time changing lures constantly. Instead, develop confidence in some good lures for surf and jetties -- and stick with them.

SHARK RIVER TO BARNEGAT INLET
Baitfish leaving the Shark and Manasquan inlets and Barnegat Bay supply this section of surf along the central Jersey coast. There are times when pods of bait will be dimpling the surface as far north and south as you can see. Most often, I’ll select just a two-mile stretch and concentrate my time and effort walking and casting into the troughs and inside the bars and the breaks between them.

BARNEGAT SOUTH TO CAPE MAY
There are miles of beach and more than a half dozen inlets, all of which are a surfcaster’s paradise. Labor Day signals the beginning of the fall run, but the fact that these spots lie more than 100 miles south of Sandy Hook results in stripers and blues arriving somewhat later on their migrational trek south.

I’ve always been impressed by the myriad inlets, no two of which are alike. These are the passageways between bay and ocean, where forage fish hatched months earlier are now vacating their nursery grounds and about to enter the real world -- where they could quickly become meals for a striper or a blue.