Great Day on the Garden State North Reef by Ed Valitutto

Posted on September 15, 2021 by VHFC

With only five days remaining after today (9/14) for the 2021 fluke season, Dave Spendiff and Bill Dabney joined me for a day on the GSN reef in my boat Set the Hook. The weather was perfect and seas were flat making for a great day fishing. Dave and Bill had 5 keepers between them while I worked on keeping the short count respectable. We also had a nice sea bass (still swimming for October) and two really sizeable sea robins which make excellent eating.

It was especially nice seeing Larry Leary on The Jen-Jen and Marty Friedrich on The Great Escape out there as well.

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Fishing Facts

Of the fifty United States, thirty-eight have a striped-bass record. New Jersey has the largest striped-bass record—a 78-pound 8·ounce whopper that was caught in 1982. The state with the smallest striped-bass record is Iowa. That landlocked striper weighed only 9 pounds 4 ounces and was caught in 1983.

There’s something fishy about beer these days. Fish Tail Ale is popular as ever, and New Jersey’s Flying Fish Brewery is one of the state’s largest specialty breweries. There’s also Washington’s Wild Salmon Organic Pale Ale, Florida’s Land Shark beer, Delaware’s Dogfish Head beer, and two versions of Stingray beer—a lighter version from the Cayman Islands and a dark beer from Canada.

The triangle fly is probably the most unusual of saltwater flies. It’s one of the few, if not only, flies tied to a treble hook. It’s also barely a fly at all, because hardly any material is used. It is complete after tying the two straw pearl twinkle flashes and the tiny tuft of natural squirrel, leaving an entire hook fully exposed. Incredibly this barebacked treble fly is a knockout when it comes to sea trout.