THE OLD GROUNDS, DE
“For big flounder during the summer out of Cape May, it’s the Old Grounds.” So advised Fred Klug several years ago when asked where the best shot at a doormat, or at least a summer flounder in excess of five pounds, would be with any degree of consistency.
Klug, the tackle department manager of Utsch’s Marina in Cape May, has over four decades of experience angling the peninsula region, and was quick to point to the Old Grounds area’s extremely rough, rocky and sticky bottoms, making the doormat hunt difficult. Terminal tackle is eaten regularly, he exposited, but the fluke ensconced around the structure certainly make it worth the efforts of big flattie fanatics, especially those with the skill and know-how of working what has been described as a subsurface nightmare scenario.
The starting point of the expansive 90- to 120-foot deep Old Grounds (38.39.500/ 74.51.500) is the DB Buoy which is approximately 23 miles from the tip of Cape May, and a bonus is the nearby Delaware Reef Site 11, giving doormat destroyers even more drifting choices. The most commonly held belief regarding the Old Grounds’ incredibly rough bottom is that it was where ships that were to ascend Delaware Bay and venture farther up the Delaware River would drop their ballast loads. This may or may not have been true.
However, the more scientific and reliable explanation is that the cobble, boulders and similar rubble are merely terminal moraine, i.e. the residual effect of the colossal force of glacial movement during the last Ice Age. All that was pushed forward stopped where the glacier ceased forward movement and began to recede. No matter which explanation for the rig-hungry bottom is believed, the fact remains that fluke, and big ones at that, sit in ambush throughout the myriad structure formations.
The depth and current mandate beefy, sometimes side-‘o-beef tackle, particularly during full and new moon periods when the tidal pull will really smoke, and require weights of up to ten ounces, maybe more. For the most part though, a three- to eight-ounce ball or bullet head jig tipped with a four- or six-inch chartreuse Gulp! Swimming Mullet, four-inch smelt pattern Pogy or six-inch chartreuse Ripple Mullet, tethered to 50- or 65-pound-test braid and a 30-pound fluorocarbon leader, will wipe doormats. Some sharpies affix a teaser and bait it with a spearing. The real deal is equally effective in the form of a stinger hook rigged whole squid, eight- to ten-inch salmon belly or a same length strip of dogfish. Fish perpendicular since any scope in the line will result in an instant hang-up instead of a hang-on.
