The presence of bunker can disrupt historical patterns, forcing a change in approach.
Bunker is the chanciest of baits. It’s here, it’s there, and it could be anywhere or nowhere, all in an instant. Porgies, crabs and sea bass on reefs, edges and jetties stay put for long periods. Sand eels come in and then don’t move much, but bunker are unpredictable. Sometimes they seem to prefer certain areas, but that’s very much the exception and not the rule.
I think of figuring out where they will be as like the lottery or roulette. “Yeerz puts yer money down” and your spot wins or loses. Many days I’ve watched a school of bunker for hours that never came in casting range only to hear later that someone nearby had a blitz of big fish. Or I franticly run 100 yards down the beach when the bunker come in and they disappear as soon as I get there.
A lot of surfcasters are thrilled when bunker are around. My reaction is complicated. I have great memories of bunker blitzes with bass up to the 40-pound class. When it’s on, a bunker bite can seem like everything you ever wanted in surfcasting—exploding bait, big bass cartwheeling through the air chasing surface plugs. Yet, their presence can change everything and not necessarily for the better.
My “come to Jesus” moment came a few years ago when I spent 10 hours fishing a local inlet on an October new moon for the skunk. I knew from my logs that should have been a productive tide. I tried a few spots there but there was nothing. I started at 10 p.m., left around 8 a.m. and an hour later bunker came in on the oceanside with bass from 20 pounds and up into the 40s. I felt pretty dumb fishing all night to miss the daytime bite. But that’s bunker.
I’m not the only one. Jake Hardy has spoken about entirely changing his approach to the fall run on the south shore of Long Island. Jake stopped fishing nights when a lot of bunker were around. With limited visibility at night he couldn’t see where the bunker were. The other issue was that, similar to what I found, fishing the open beach or inlets with current or structure doesn’t pay off when the bass become intoxicated with bunker.
Jake and I have separately reached the same conclusion and radically altered how we fish. He uses an e-bike and I mostly use my car, but we both fish daytime and try to cover ground to find bunker in close being hit by bass.
Not fishing nights is a loss: there’s less traffic, more solitude and it’s eerily beautiful. But I can live with not fishing nights. What really gets me is that large schools of bunker can, and at times have, ruined one of the most cerebral and beautiful aspects of the sport: fishing patterns and windows.
The kind of fishing (inlets) that I’ve given up was still dependent on bait movement. Bunker disrupt this form of fishing, but also disrupts fishing reefs with their stable populations of sea bass, porgies, bergalls, blackfish etc. I no longer fish summers in Montauk like I used to, but I’ve spoken to two surfcasters about how bunker has changed the summer fishery in Montauk. Both Bill Wetzel and Chris Voorhies have put in many hours learning spots that will produce on very specific windows of tide, wind and moon-phase.
Traditionally, summer resident bass in Montauk’s reefs have tended to be quite predictable. They settle into patterns, especially the really big bass which are more pattern-oriented. But cow bass are not immune to the allure of bunker, a large, high-calorie meal swimming in dense schools. This has led to resident fish abandoning the patterns they followed and instead simply follow the bunker to pick them off. And I’ve spoken to enough New Jersey and New England guys to know that this disruption holds up elsewhere.
Chris and Bill have found that their ability to pick a couple of huge bass by putting in the time and effort to understand their feeding habits, and what presentation these finicky summer fish will take, is lost when the bass abandon their usual haunts to pursue bunker. When he bass key on bunker there is still the possibility of big fish, and they are very often aggressive and easy to fool, but it’s a highly chancy and luck-dependent way to fish more often than not.
