Remember the Long Branch pier very well as a kid. Anyone who never fished it can ever imagine the amount of fish that were landed by everyone during the course of a night in the fall / winter when the ling and whiting moved in. It was insane fishing! The northeast corner of the pier was furthest out and produced the best but most nights anywhere on the pier you could catch fish. They used to have an old chum grinder inshore a little bit that they would grind left over carcasses and drop chum into the water. Not sure it made a difference especially with the ling and whiting but it was pretty cool. One helluva a fluke pier as well. Remember one September day when the fluke were schooling up getting ready for their easterly migration there were about a dozen and a half fluke caught over 8 lbs on that pier with at least half over 10 lbs. The biggest that day was 13.8 lbs. They'd drop a mesh basket down and you would have to work the fluke into the basket and then have the guy working the basket for you raise it when you positioned the fluke above it and then hoist it 50 feet or so to the deck. It was crazy but fluke fishing on the LB pier was phenomenal.

Back to whiting and ling, don't think those days will ever rebound. This October was headed to the Hudson on our boat and ran across literally acres of spike whiting floating on the surface. Thousands of them. I hear what Reel Class is saying but in my opinion there's no way a fishery can sustain itself with the commercial pressure on it that whiting have. The draggers are killing the stock....period. I understand cyclical but if a certain stock doesn't come back for about 40 years, I don't think that qualifies as cyclical. Can almost guarantee if the fishery was regulated and the killing of thousands if not millions of juvenile fish was prohibited, that fishery would bounce back in a few years. How could it not.

Dakota