The cover of last week’s “Coastal Fishermen,” the Maryland and Delaware coast?s free fishing weekly, showed a beaming Bill Goins of Georgetown, Del., holding his Assateague Island-caught 43-inch, 35-pound, 4-ounce striper taken using a bunker head for bait. It doesn’t always happen that way in surf fishing. It doesn’t happen that way every day.
The following week, catches for most sinker slingers along the surf were skates and dogfish, with the blues and stripers “off” for awhile. Surf fishing often is a feast-or-famine situation. No, it has nothing to do with whether you eat or not. It has to do with the catching.
For Al Harding of Annapolis, it was good last week when he caught a bluefish. Before that, “we killed the bluefish”, he noted happily of his recent fishing success.
For Brian Grant of Annapolis, fishing was off part of the time over the Memorial Day weekend. He was using baits such as finger mullet, squid, cut bait and bunker to take bottom feeders surging through the surf.
Fishing has been sporadic, according to Shanan Rogers, owner of Buck’s Place, the surf shop on Route 611 on the way south to Assateague out of West Ocean City.
“This past weekend they were getting some nice ones,” she said of the surf fishing that produced weigh-in stripers of 41, 37, 28 and 29 inches.
She suggested that the best fishing is at night and early morning hours. She likes bunker heads on 8/0 and 9/0 hooks for big rockfish ? smaller hooks and cut bunker for the smaller stripers.
Capt. Jason Mumford who charters out of Ake Marine in West Ocean City, likes any kind of bunker for surf fishing.
“We do just as well on chunk as we do on heads,” he said when asked about Assateague surf fishing. “We’re waiting for the next full moon for stripers and big red drum to come up from Virginia. They are following the bait north.”
Mumford said fishing is best on a falling tide, casting outside of the cuts between bars. He likes to get on the beach at dead low tide to check the holes and sloughs, then come back on a high and fish outside of the slough inlet on the first two hours of the falling tide.
For the best fishing, stick to the Assateague Island National Seashore. There is no off-road vehicle use in the Assateague State Park, and no parking for fishermen in the camping-only area. The day-use area for fishermen is open only from 9 a.m. to sunset, not the best times for most big fish or serious fishing.
Limited off-road vehicle use with a permit is allowed in the off-road zone in the Assateague Island National Seashore. There, you can fish at night, dawn and dusk. And you can cast those bunker heads ? or chunks ? for big stripers.
You can reach C. Boyd Pfeiffer at [email protected].
