nj saltwater Fishing Report 2024

Late Post .... Sorry my Internet was dead today. Captain Mike Pritchard called in this morning with good fishing. He had 53 fish of the kelps by 9 AM.

Steady sonar stops for our 30 anglers produced 104 yellowtail from 12-20 lbs. 40 lb mono on a 20 or 30 size conventional reel and a yoyo jig was the most productive. Trips are filling up fast for this season. Make those resos

Aug. 17
    Today almost went as planned except for the lack of yellowfin.  We were supposed to scratch pretty good at the yellowfin in the morning, like 40 or so and then get on that big bluefin, and then scratch out another 30 or so yellowfin in the evening.  Well we did the middle part but the numbers were lower on the sides.  We saw plenty of that yellowfin, it just didn't bite well.  On with the cool part.  We found a mega school of that 70-100+ pound bluefin mid morning.  It's been a long time since I've seen a mega school and every time I do I forget about the time before and I think it's the biggest school I've ever seen and that's how today was.  Of course it didn't bite, but for me up in the wheel house where I can see it well it was incredible.  Just the area of fish was monstrous, and when you add in all the shiners and thousands of black backs swimming through, it's amazing.  We fished it for 4 hours on different attempts.  On the first, the youngster Brendan hooked up and landed about an 80 pounder.  On the second, his dad Scott hooked up and lost it and we hooked and lost another one.  On the third, Scott hooked up again but this time he landed his 107 pounder. So far it's looking like we'll have a father- son jack pot.  On the next few tries we got no reaction so we let it regroup for a while and a couple hours later we found it again and we hooked two more and lost them both and we missed a bite on the kite.  We tried it one more time after that for no reaction before we left it for good.  We're going to fish again tomorrow.  We'll make a small move and relocate but as things are right now, we don't need much more yellowfin so we'll concentrate on the other kind of tuna.
                                    

 

Captain Mike Pritchard checked in tonight with an update from the Tribute out of Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay, CA.  Sorry for the late report tonight.  We found a school of Bluefin on the way home and let them have it!  We ended our day with 9 Bluefin and 18 kelp grade yellowtail.

We go again tonight! Come on out and get some

Sep. 4

Another good day for us today. Most of the first half of the day was spent traveling. We did some trolling and stuff and stopped on a kelp and took advantage of the mackerel we got. There was a ton of tiny yellowtail and small tuna on it but as soon as I talked everyone into using mackerel we started getting bigger tuna and some dorado. Shortly there after we found a school of those cow bluefin but all we got out of it was a couple boils. No bites. We looked around for a while after that only catching tuna that we wouldn't put a tag on because they were too small. Then out of the blue we had a problem with the boat that made us need to be drifting to take care of it so our friends on the Spirit Of Adventure were getting ready to leave a drift to make it to new grounds by morning time so we took it over. Perfect timing too. We needed to stop so why not stop on fish. That's what we did and they snapped for us until dark. The issue was taken care of and we're now drifting and will stay that way until sunrise tomorrow. The weather was good today. Compared to the last 5 days it was windy and rolly as hell but we've been spoiled the last 5 days. It's normal good weather now.

Drew

3 yellowfin 65 skipjack 12 yellowtail. Steady action all day long.

This morning we had a passenger who was having a medical problem and had to be airlifted off. We were lucky as Coast Guard was near by rescuing some people off a sailboat. So it was very quick and efficient. Last report is he is doing well. Fishing today was ok. We got some jig strikes for a handful of tuna above the island. In the afternoon we got the anchor down and continued to fish the tuna until a shark shut us down. So we moved to another spot that had good signs of tuna. But even though they were showing well they did not want to bite. The yellowtail however did bite and we got some big hombart yellowtail for about an hour and a half until the shark found us from the previous spot and shut us down again. So we tried to out smart him and swung back up to the original spot and got into some 20-55 pounders. Tomorrow we will be in a different area and should be fishing by 9:30 tomorrow morning. Our weather is ok. There was some wind going down, but not a bad ride. And it was beautiful calm in the lee of the island. Chef Rick is on board this trip and made a great roasted chicken with a garlic cream sauce, zucchini and rice. And dessert was Death by Chocolate. Really good. Thanks for checking in.

Variety was the theme on our first 3 local fishing trips of the year. Yellowtail , bonito , halibut , calico bass , sand bass , sheephead , lingcod , red rock cod and rockfish were all part of our fish count the past few days. The highlight of our weekend was a yellowtail we caught Sunday morning that was every bit of 30 pounds. The best rigs were a dropper loop with 6 oz. torpedo sinker and a sliding egg sinker rig with a 3/4 oz. Our next trip is on Friday November 23. Call Seaforth at 619-224-3383 for reservations.