A total 24-hour surf game plan to catch striped bass in the November surf.
Where do I start? There are few months of the Jersey surfcaster’s year where the daily life is built around the striped bass run. November is it. It is the time to establish a fake cough the day before to strategically plan sick days off work, barter with your significant other to trade fishing weekends for Christmas shopping in December or quite simply, flat out just quit whatever you’ve got going on and hit the surf recourse be damned, because now is when a saltwater surfcaster’s life is fulfilled.
Opportunity shines bright every single minute of November’s glory, with one caveat—that you plan your stint in the surf, whether it’s three hours or 24 hours, to maximize your successes. So here’s what I’m offering. This is how I plan my attack during the November fall run in a 24-hour stretch.
Predawn Departure
Get rested, get ready and set the alarm. All striped bass want to feed before the sun comes up and during false dawn, and there is simply no better time to hook a striper than the low light hours. My go-to rig during these hours is a 75-pound Spro barrel swivel, 30 inches of 30-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon, 16 inches down a dropper loop with 2/0 bucktail white teaser hook and 14 inches down 50-pound TA or Coastlock clip, to which these lures will be clipped according to conditions. I tie on a Bomber A-Salt or 16A blurple or Storm or Tsunami swim shad to start.
Sunup is primo time to get the best action of the day. Scout out a hole or dead low sandbar to walk upon and work it hard. It’s a walk and cast affair right now to explore a 300-yard stretch and work all the holes. Your best action of all day will occur during this time so if you heard about a crazy bite at 8 a.m. you were too late. Striped bass are focusing on shadows and silhouettes at this time. Slow retrieve any lure you toss and have ultimate patience to present a lethargic wobble. Bass will hit the lure one to three times sometimes before you get a solid connection. Keep the lure moving in the low light, slow and steady.
Sunrise Hours
When the sun cracks the horizon, bass can discern colors a bit better. Switchover tactics from black Bombers to lighter colors like yellow or white. Watch the sun’s angle and adjust accordingly on an overcast or sunny day; keep dark colors like olive and blue on overcast days; and when sunny go with school bus chicken scratch colors. For more new schoolers, Daiwa SP Minnows get the job done, but any olive coloring pattern is tops in my book for all around environmental conditions. Prepare for any bait situation; if sand eels, peanut bunker, blasting schools or even herring, big bunker, carry an assortment of lures. Bunker or mullet around? Throw Stillwater or TA poppers on the inside of bars as incoming tides wash off the sand spits from flat to 5 feet of water. Sand eels? Bring the metals. Toss Ava 007 to Ava 27 naked to green yellow or orange tails. Peanuts? One-ounce Crippled Herring jigs and Storm shads. But all around, my favorite, are Tsunami sand eels.
Hands down, last year in November during the sunup time frame, I caught literally hundreds of stripers from 16 to 34 inches on the Tsunami sand eels as that was the predominant bait from Bay Head to IBSP where I would only get a few hits on other lures. Point is, match the hatch to start, and prospect with all different lures if you are unsure first, but switch over when you really start getting whacked. Where you have luck one morning, you can bet the very next morning added with 45 minutes those fish will be right where you left. I fondly remember getting up to one hole around the IBSP area every single morning from November 16 to December 26 and pulled 10 to 25 bass out of it before 8 a.m. It can be that hot.
Run & Gun Lunch
Late morning, it’s time to move around as stuff could be blowing up anywhere along the stretch of sands. Generally bass start to go down after 9 a.m., and you have to get mobile and start working holes, sloughs jetties and sandbars all depending on the tides and winds. Optimal conditions are generally north/northeast, but straight east and west winds are also fine. Straight south is the death knell, but if the south has at least 50 percent east in it to make it southeast legit, then I would still fish. Water temps generally should be hovering anywhere from the 54 to 65 degrees through the whole month as it’s a very transitional time frame and is open and up for much fluctuation depending on climate and yearly conditions. Of course, based on the higher than normal October water temps, this could change. However, this general time frame is when I’m running and searching for telltale signs of fish feeding. Could bunker be pushing in and bass blowing ‘em up, or sand eels flittering about as bass suck them down in swoops and boils in the undertow?
When the plug bite dies, it’s a good time to deadstick style clam or bunker chunk. All your options need to be covered here whether it’s dead baiting, or cast and blast. When dead baiting I bring a 12-foot Shimano Tiralejo and Tsunami 1202 XXH matched with Shimano 14000 Ultegra reels to chunk, one with a fishfinder braid friendly slide clip with a 3- to 5-ounce pyramid sinker, generally a 24-inch section of 40-pound Seaguar fluorocarbon line snelled to a size 10/0 Gamakatsu or Mustad Octopus hook. This is also the time to start chasing down peanut bunker schools with an old school egg sinker snag rig, 75-pound swivel 24-inch section of 30-pound fluorocarbon and a size 1/0 treble hook; send it out and rip through a school to snag a peanut bunker, snag one, and release the bail and let it flitter about on the ground with leader where bass will key in on it and suck it up. A point I can’t stress enough is don’t follow the school of bass as they move quickly, but stay behind as even 10 minutes after, bass will be there to suck down the crippled baits before you leapfrog and jump to follow the schools.
Magic Hours
As the sun gets lower in the SW sky, it’s time to get serious again and get on the search; pull up the brakes and put the car in gear to street hop the coast. If you got a beach buggy, there are permits up and down the coast – check the New Jersey Beach Buggy Association at www.njbba.org and find what town has permits for you to buy. If you don’t have a permit, no problem; it’s just a lot more street hopping for you. But the point is, during this time of day, bass can be blitzing anywhere, and you want to find the bait pods and stick to them for the evening rush anywhere along the stretch of sands. Don’t leave the bait. If you find a pod, stay on it and follow it up and down because once evening falls, the fish will find it. Afternoon hours usually bring in more bluefish, but bass will continue to chase bait schools during the day, you have to commit to being mobile in one shape or form.
Which brings us to settling in; the settle down time is about patience. Find some bait if you can that is holding in a jetty, hole, slough or sandbar you can walk out and cast. If there is bait around, don’t leave fish to find fish. Sundown hours will always get bass on the feed. Have your trusted assortment around as stripers, hickory shad and remnant blues will push around bait in the undertow areas, or just outside the sand bar on a low tide and stay on them. My arsenal at this time of day and time of year consists of a Mambo Minnow, Ava 17 jig with green tail, Tsunami swim shad, Bomber A-Salt and a teaser 2/0 in front of the hook on all offerings. When the sun gets dim, you have about a 45-minute window when the fish are going to feed hardcore. Keep casting and don’t stop. Just because you don’t see fish doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Position yourself if you can between three or four jetties that you can easily walk to and work pockets on if need be. Claim your space; if you do get hit in a hole, stick there. There will be more fish, so have patience.
The Night Shift
While everyone else has given up, night time is your time to shine. If you can land a high tide around 8 p.m. around the new and full moon tides, you could be into some serious plug casting. Go dark with everything you’ve got, meaning any dark colored lure you throw from a wooden metal-lipped swimmer to an SP Minnow or Bomber; go with black, black/purple or dark green color patterns. I’m telling you more bass are caught during the dark hours than during the daytime. There’s often a noticeable lack of bites from around midnight until 3 a.m. but the fish will still be on the bite if you work hard enough. I’m not saying the fish won’t be there during that time, but if you stop getting aggressive hits on the plugs, switch up to bunker chunking to target the big mommas around. More often than not, the 20- to 40-pound bass will eagerly suck down a fresh bunker chunk deadsticked out on the night shift when others are working plugs to no avail.
Listen, all sorts of “coasties” have their own tactics depending on where they are fishing and how they are doing it that I have not covered, as in live eels on jetties in Jetty Country, bucktailing the LBI suds, or drifting clams along Cape May County beaches; but the point is you have to adapt to the fishery around you and dial in the local tackle shop knowledge for your entire day and night game plan if you want to hit it hard for 24 hours. Listen to what’s been happening and trust your local tackle shops, log books and knowledge and always be willing to change up a game plan if an hour or two goes by without a hit.
Plan on working a 10-mile stretch wherever you may roam to cover all the bases; success is not always easy. Social media makes everyone look like a hero nowadays because they got that one fish. I’m here to tell you it’s not that easy, but it can be. Only if you put in the time to understand the environment, bait presence, wind and tide conditions and flat out perseverance will you become a proficient surf angler that consistently can make a 24-hour shift put you in the record books.
Case in point, I proved to myself this theory by fishing a 24-hour shift last November 30 and released 69 bass in that shift from 14 to 38 inches. The only reason I didn’t break a triple digit catch is because I had to make a pit stop at the Crab’s Claw to fuel up! But this year, I’m not stopping for food. I’m breaking triple digit bass catches on a 24-hour shift.
You gonna meet me there?