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Quote:

Originally Posted by beerbelly (Post 346569)

does anyone know why the ling r so scarce, is just a cycle there going through, or to many dog fish, or r they getting killed as by catch, its getting hard to put a decent catch together

I already posted a few days ago on the hay days of whiting & ling fishing off the Long Branch pier. However, I'll go you one better.

My grandfather was an old Russian who took me several times in the mid 1940's for night walks along the beach in winter when it was ass-freezing cold. We had carbide miners lights on our heads. I only went a few times when I was about 5 or 6 years old, but I really did get to experience the "Frost-Fishing" for whiting. You may have heard of it and thought it was bullshit, but it really did happen. On these super cold nights, the whiting would chase the baitfish (spearing?) up onto the sand and immediately freeze. They could be picked up and thrown into the coal bags or potato sacks we carried. I think I can remember getting a half dozen whiting like this. These we taken home to his chicken farm in Freehold and smoked in a homemade smoker. The smoker was also used to smoke eels speared thru the ice off the Marine Place docks in Red Bank.

Anybody else old enough to remember frost fishing or spearing eels in winter?

Denny