Fish On
Local rivers have large amounts of fish
RON NUZZOLO
WithNewYork flounder season opening up April 1, New Jersey anglers get a head start. Winter flounder and striped bass combos if you're lucky. Flounder season is in full swing with the Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers producing some action over theweekend.Over the next two weeks we should see numbers pick up as more and more boats get back in the water to kick off 2008.

Navesink and Shrewsbury rivers and the Raritan Bay already have huge schools of bunker and herring migrating through so big you can smell it in the air. The smell of spring to all anglers. Ooooh, that smell, it's the spring fever we all look forward to getting. Over the next several weeks, big migrating bass will be on hot pursuit of these massive schools as they fatten up. This makes theRaritanBay one of the top fishing grounds in the world.

Bass from 20 to 30 pounds are common, and playing catch and releasewith these fish is what I love best. The Raritan Bay is almost like the end of the world, a giant pool where bunker end up spending the summer in search of plankton, and theRaritanBay is rich in plankton. A place where big hungry bass and chopper blues patrol and corral these fish for the summer. Truly an angler's paradise. If plankton and bunker were removed fromthe food chain, so would fishing as we know it. That's what makes the Raritan Bay so special. The Raritan harbors everything fromthe bottomof the food chain like plankton and bunker to everything in between. It holds a variety of sport fish such as fluke, flounder,weakfish, blues, bass, porgies and blackfish.