There are always a few spots that fall by the wayside as the years pass on, and one of them is the Tabletop. Situated roughly 9 miles outside the Great Egg Inlet, the area is basically a plateau surrounded by deeper holes along the 10 fathom line. You can find waters anywhere from 35 to 70 feet, providing plenty of ledges and holes for a variety of species to settle into and around.
The main game here is during the summer when fluke colonize the area big time. Flatfish will lie on all sides, but look for the sloping edges as they stage on the angles to ambush prey that gets swiped over with the currents. As deep water close to shore is hard to find in South Jersey, during late summer in August and September, it’s the place fluke stop at on their migration outward.
Work the deeper holes and depressions with big baits such as 12-inch long fluke bellies taken from one of your boxed fish for the day, and drifted on fish-finder slide rigs. You can also drop down 3- to 6-ounce bucktails tipped with long strip baits or large Peruvian spearing.
A ton of bait settles into the area and at any given time you can have peanut bunker, sand eels, rainfish or spearing oiling up the waters. Come September and October, the Tabletop becomes an inshore troller’s haven as anglers cruise around the edges and ledges on all sides dragging feathers, Clark spoons, and Got-Chas tying into the southern speedsters of little tunny, bonito and Spanish mackerel.
In recent years, small chicken dolphin and king mackerel have even been taken in the area. Summertime sharkers also have a ball sending out a bunker chum slick and doing battle with a variety of species including targeted threshers with protected throwbacks like browns, dusky sharks, and sand tigers in the mix. When fluking, always have a big time rod rigged and ready with a steel leader shark hook set up to pitch a bait back as sharks always seem to be cruising the area to inspect what’s going on.
This summer, a good piece of advice is not only to hit the Tabletop directly, but also to check around its outskirts, as there are a few older wrecks on east side and south side, most notably a Car Wreck Float, which was a barge carrying a load of vintage era cars that sank decades ago. There’s not much left of the debris from the decaying effects of the sea, but there’s still enough there to hold the doormat fluke of your dreams and maybe allow you to pick away at a couple of humpback black sea bass.
