I agree it's cyclic. Remember stripers decimated and never recovering? Now weakfish are decimated and gone from north NJ. Why? It's not that simple to say the commercial demons did it again to us. Not with weakfish.
The whiting fishing is very nastalgic. LOOK BACK....
Long Branch pier night fishing for whiting with my old man and brother in January in the early 70's. That's my life long memory. Cleaning up whiting and ling at Scotland light. There actually being an Ambrose Tower to watch.
Notice. There are no new fishing piers. Long Branch is gone. Probably both Seaside and Keansburg are not too far behind. Sad thing as it's an excellent way to introduce kids to fishing that you can actually leave when they get bored. Change again. To me not for better.
It's a cycle and things change. Now that Old Orchard is part of the reef program, they will likely make some ugly looking lattice structure to take its place. Bye lighthouse! A clone of the boring looking Greak Kills buglight? Probably. No character.
Nature cycles, we evolve not necessarily how we'd like.
Funny you read old books and you find that Raritan Bay had marked off areas for private clam and oyster grounds. Picture that happening today?
What about blowfish in Raritan or Sandy Hook Bays.
Or the 42' partyboat Pelican out of Montauk overloaded with 62 passengers (the Book DARK NOON) on a Labor day trip That trip killed 42 of them- top heavy and rolled.
Things change + and -. Nature readjusts and readjusts. The whiting are back( as stated earlier) and tweaking their migration a bit every year too.
Live long enough and history repeats itself. Maybe be a 150 years though.
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Originally Posted by Reel Class
Not bursting anybody's bubbles here but there were a good amount of whiting in the deeper reaches of the mud hole and up on the north side this past spring and early summer. These were not the baseball bat sized fish nor where they all spikes, but they were there. Yes totally different fishery than that of 25 + years ago but there were more around this year than there have been in 20 years.
I'm a big believer in most "fisheries" being cyclical - some species have good spurts while others have spurts where they are hard to come by. The most notorious example of this would be our weakfish fishery - where we have wild cycles where they are thick as fleas and others where there are virtually no fish around.
I also read somewhere once that a couple of generations in the 1800's never SAW a bluefish in NJ waters, only to have them return later on in droves and people who saw/caugth them had no idea what they were. Hard to believe right?
On a similar note, I read somewhere that fishermen/scientists hypothesized that those whiting seen offshore were migrators from the stocks out east - not from a localized stock (mud hole) which we used to have before it was completely wiped out.
They taste great, are easy to catch, and will basically eat anything so if they come back in any #'s it will be great for all of us.
Although I never set foot on the Long Branch Pier, I remember several occasions in the 80's where the old Casino Pier in SSH (the one that Sandy took w/ her) was the site of some "wild" early spring evenings where jumbo breeder ling and whiting were flying over the rails and into the sinks and buckets 2-3 at a time. Great times - let's hope the stock gets rebuilt and we can enjoy them again!
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