In deep waters bluefish are prey to Mako sharks. In shallow waters, close enough to the shoreline, bluefish are the number one predators feasting on helpless bait – bunker, sand eels, and later on in the season full-grown spearing. One of the wonders of nature is to see the water boil with bluefish blitzing, shredding and eating baitfish prey. One just has to watch a youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSfX8jg7mK0to see the massive, angry, hungry savage attack conducted by these feisty, toothy, aggressive inshore predators.
Obviously, bluefish are fun to catch. They are just fierce fighters just hooking into one could brace the back of any old-timer. A feisty bluefish, even a two-pound cocktail, could set one’s reel singing and test the quality of the reel’s drag. For added fun, if the bluefish are around, I will use a short five-foot fishing pole with eight-pound test line to test my fishing skills. It’s an added challenge of go light tackle for these ferocious predators. Nonetheless it’s oh so much fun to listen to the drag sing, to feel the rod wobble, not knowing for sure if one’s fishing tackle is sturdy enough to the challenge.
Last year, however, there was a dearth of bluefish. I don’t know for sure what happened, but the bluefish run only lasted for several days then was over. Usually the bluefish are at the Inlet in troves for a few weeks before they head deeper into the back bays. Not last year. They seemed to have dwindled in numbers. As a result there were less snappers in September because less bluefish spawned in the back bays.
The dwindling of bluefish could change the whole scheme of nature. If there aren’t many predators feasting on baitfish, the baitfish population grows huge, and the fierce struggle for food among baitfish gets thrown off-balance. And the lack of bluefish also could throw off the feeding pattern of striped bass, who usually follow bluefish around, because when bluefish are shredding baitfish, morsels fall to the bottom of the waterway for striped bass to pick up as easy meals.
Flukes, aka summer flounders, are also fierce, predators but they don’t swim as fast as bluefish and don’t attack baitfish in the same manner, shredding thousands and thousands apart with huge schools attacking simultaneously.
Bluefish usually enter the Long Island waterway in the first month of spring. They leave their northern Florida estuaries to come up north when the water temperature warms up and when the mackerel, the ultimate prey, start to head to cooler waters. It’s mackerels that start the evolutionary feeding chain by pushing up north, and closely followed by hungry bluefish.
Without troves of mackerel inciting the bluefish to chase, the bluefish could stay in friendly confines that offer other baitfish besides mackerel, thus the bluefish stay south and don’t swim as far north as Maine but stay in great numbers as far north as New Jersey. It all depends. Nature is tricky. Some years it provides other years it provides very little. This is why I pay attention to fishing reports. Earlier this week, third week in April, I read a report from southern New Jersey that read that someone had caught a cocktail bluefish. I could only assume the report was truthful but if it is that means the Long Island shoreline should see them soon.
This week I will try my luck at the oceanfront beaches to see if I catch anything. Last year, trying for either bluefish or striped bass, I caught a 15-pound bass on a bunker chunk. I didn’t catch any bluefish because there weren’t that many around. I didn’t see many caught whenever I went fishing. This was surprising given that I usually see plenty of bluefish every year. Not last year, however, it was the worse year for bluefish in recent memory.
Nonetheless that means nothing this year, as every season, every year, changes. It’s a part of fishing to figure out usually incorrectly where the fish are going to be. There’s only one way to find out. And that’s by soaking a line.
