If history should repeat, October could rock for striped bass at the Jersey Shore.
Rewind to the late 1990s and early 2000s, you could bet that in the height of the mullet run and with peanut bunker spilling out of the backwaters, stripers would be on a serious feed throughout the month of October. The quintessential autumnal month was always the time to plan your striper fishing either by boat or surf in Jersey, though that pattern has most definitely shifted to making November and early December the primo months to target bass oceanside. This year seems different.
A relatively cool water summertime only had temps up to 73 degrees late in August and an early start to cool water conditions and with fall-like nights just after Labor Day of ’24 may just be the impetus to get a throwback pattern for bass to make their initial move in October once again.
Backwater Brawling
Up and down the New Jersey coast, the backwater bays and river systems have been holding resident stripers through the summer. With dropping air temps falling every night, the smorgasbord of baitfish choking the backwaters spill into the channel cuts and inlet areas sparking bass to feed and making for some fantastic opportunity on light tackle and skiff fishing. Some of my fondest backwater bass memories were fishing with Capt. Bryan Dileo in the Ocean City backwaters, working the creekmouths with his skiff on outgoing tides as we navigated the skinny creeks tossing small Stillwater Smack-It and Tsunami poppers along the sod banks to pull bass off the banks as stripers hid under the cover of the banks to ambush prey. Hits are explosive and commonplace in the predawn hours right before the sun comes up.
Other fantastic backwater sessions happened when I joined Dave Showell of the Absecon Bay Sportsman to drift live mullet through Broad Creek Thorofare and throughout the Absecon Bay to connect with loads of bass in the 26- to 38-inch range. The rig Showell used is of the fishfinder variety consisting of a half-ounce egg sinker tied above a barrel swivel, a 30-inch section of 30-pound Yo-Zuri or Seaguar fluorocarbon leader to a size #5/0 Mustad or Gamakatsu Circle Hook to which a live mullet is hooked through both nostrils and sent down to the bottom.
Find any bay or river system and pay attention to the overhanging sodbanks where channels drop from shallow to deep in an instant to pick off bass with poppers and live mullet baits. Backwaters are most definitely productive during the month in large shallow bays such as Barnegat Bay, Lake’s Bay, Great Bay and Great Egg Harbor.
Bridge Bumping
Myriad bridges along the coast harbor bass waiting along the pilings to ambush prey. Hot spots always include the Highlands Bridge, Manasquan River drawbridge, the 9th Street bridge in Ocean City and the Corson’s Inlet outflow bridge. Light tackle is the go-to choice here with 7- to 7-1/2-foot Shimano Terramar Northeast spinning rods matched with Shimano Stradic 5000 class reels spooled with 30-pound Power Pro braid.
Your lure selection should typically be soft. Generally slender profile soft baits like 5-3/4-inch Fin-S Fish or Bass Assassins get lit up by bridge bass as you drift past the stanchions and make deft casts upcurrent working the lure down in the water column as you pass on by. Night time action is exemplary as the bass hang in the shadowlines to pounce on baitfish, especially during the end of the incoming and start of the outgoing tides, offering up a 45-minute to 1-hour window of non-stop action.
If you can line up a dead high tide at say 8 p.m., I’d almost guarantee some action with bridge bass throughout the month.
Out Front
There are the usual boundless options to target the early season ocean minded stripers: trolling with bunker spoons, mojo balls, shad bar rigs or opting for the “snag and switch” hopping the bunker schools (snag a bunker, switch it over to a circle hook rig). Keep in mind though that when bass are starting their migration southward, a fantastic option is to utilize artificial lures to tempt a strike out of them. Rocky structure extending into the ocean tends to hold those fish, and no better place than jetty country from Manasquan Inlet north off Spring Lake, Asbury Park and up to the Highlands. Hopping from jetty to jetty tip via boat and tossing large metal-lipped wooden swimmers get bone-jarring strikes from bass milling around the rocks as they pin bait schools to the structure.
Regular swimming plugs and surface cruisers like Bombers, Island X Hellfires or SP Minnows also hold their weight if you stay 50 to 100 yards off the jetty tips and cast off the tips, working the plugs back to you pulling fish off the rocks. Many mornings you’ll be able to get visuals of bass spraying peanut bunker or spearing schools around on the surface, and those are obvious times to work the edges of the pods with shads, plugs or poppers.
Along the coastline, if fish are holding down in the water column, drop metal jigs on them, especially if sand eels are in the mix. Once you roll over a bunch of red marks, send down Ava 27 to 87 jigs on the marks and slowly reel them back up to get stopped in your tracks. If the slow reel doesn’t seem to work, try swoop jigging the metals to elicit a strike. Larger 6- to 10-inch Storm, Tsunami or rigged NLBN shads are candy to feeding fish, mainly dropped down and lightly jigged up or slow reeled back to the boat.
As water temperatures are still generally on the higher side for bass in October existing in the high to mid-60s, stripers will be on a nocturnal and sunup/sundown type of feed until the big chill of November ushers in true bassy water in the high 50’s to have them on the feed 24 hours a day around the clock. October striper sorties should be planned for those low light hours for maximum success rate in hooking up, though there are always exceptions, especially oceanside, where blitzing conditions can pop up late morning and even through the high sun afternoon hours. High tide hours are primo, where swollen waters in the back allow bass to navigate the otherwise thin waters of channels to stage and feed.
Will we see a historical throwback to an explosive October run of stripers? Time will tell, but my prediction is Jersey anglers are going to be pleasantly surprised this month.
