Three years ago on October 5th, my wife Michele and I left our house at the Jersey Shore pre-dawn Saturday for the Poconos to spend the day and night with friends. Before getting to the Driscoll Bridge, my cellphone began buzzing with text messages. Apparently, the first wave of big striped bass hit the beaches of Ocean County, piling on adult bunker schools.
Gritting me teeth and cursing in my head, my wife turned to me from the passenger seat and asked, “do you want to turn around?” So, just how lucky am I? Suffice to say friends and family come before fishing. Well, sometimes. But we continued along towards my friend’s Pocono house, and at 10 a.m. I had landed my first largemouth. By the time we returned home late Sunday afternoon, there were clear signs of the beachfront melee, but the bunker schools were happily swimming out along the beach, unmolested.
The next onslaught would arrive a few weeks later, with Ocean and Monmouth County beaches catching fire through November with stripers whacking young and adult bunker, as well as any reasonable facsimile. I’m still convinced, to this day, that the first wave of jumbo stripers we see along the beaches in later September and early October are fast-moving and quick to leave our waters on their southern migration. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you can be first to enjoy this buffalo stampede before it’s done. By then the best surf bite is by working cover of dark before the sustained wave of migrating bass arrives a few weeks later.
In my weekly video fishing forecast for the week of October 3, 2022, I spoke of particularly nasty weather preceding that bull rush of stripers, with a steady NE heave finally giving way to W/NW winds by Saturday the 8th. With bunker “nosing” up against the wind, folks who were in the “right place at the right time” found bedlam at their feet. Wind and waves will play a big part in the success of the fall run, bait too of course.
It’s sometimes hard to fathom that the longstanding world record striped bass of 78 pounds, 8 ounces was caught in late September of ‘82. The late Al McReynolds landed that behemoth on the 21st of September during the height of the mullet run. Truth be told, I’m writing this editor’s log on the morning of September 22, 2025, thinking the night prior 43 years ago, and what it must’ve been like for big Al along the Vermont Avenue jetty that stormy night. But boy have times changed!
As of this writing, I have no idea what the weather has in store for us when this digital weekly edition comes out on October 6th. But I will say this; I promised my wife I’d go sunflower picking on the afternoon of October 4th (no, I’m dead serious, sunflower picking), so there’s a good chance my phone’s already been buzzing with the call of the buffalo.
At least I got my lunker bass the last time I snoozed my buddies back home on the beach! Suffice to say, from this point on during the fall season, fishing comes first. Sorry honey.
