New moon springs load the jetties as fluke bail out of the warm back bays

Last week was one of those stretches where the back bays did the talking. Shark River and the Manasquan backwaters went flat, warm, and a little lazy through the holiday stretch — the kind of soupy water that makes a fluke start looking for the exit. That's exactly what happened. The channels and inlet mouths picked up fish that a week ago were sitting happy on the flats behind Belmar. Wind was mostly light out of the south and southwest, nothing that tore up the surf, and the moon was sliding down toward new, which meant tides were building all week instead of settling into anything lazy.

That build matters this week. We're heading into new moon on the calendar around the 11th to 13th, which stacks up spring tides — bigger swings, faster water through the inlets, more current pushing bait where it needs to go. The piece that's got my attention is how the PM flood is lining up right on top of sunset for the next several days. That's the first time since the June full moon that the evening tide and the last light have synced up this clean, and if you've fished the rocks long enough you know what that means: bait gets pinned against structure right as the light goes flat and the stripers stop being cautious about it. I'll take that setup over almost anything else this time of year.

Stripers have been there for it already. Sea Bright rocks and the Monmouth Beach jetties gave up a mixed bag through the week — mostly schoolies in the 20 to 26 inch range, but enough 30-inch-plus fish mixed in on peanut bunker pushes to keep me out there past when I should've quit. Best window has been the last two hours of the incoming into the top of the tide, right at dusk, working the down-current side of the rocks in 6 to 10 feet of water. Pencil poppers and bone/white darters have been drawing strikes when there's showing bait on top; when it's quiet I've dropped to a 1-ounce bucktail with a white curl-tail trailer and crawled it along the rock face. With the springs building into the weekend, I'd expect that bite to sharpen through Friday into Monday — the current's going to run harder and longer, which stacks bait tighter against the jetty tips instead of letting it spread out over the flat.

Fluke are the other story of the week, and it's a straightforward one — the bay got too warm for comfort and the fish voted with their fins. Manasquan Inlet's main channel and the deeper drop-off just inside Shark River Inlet have both been holding better grade fish than the bay has seen in a month. Working 3/4 to 1-ounce bucktails tipped with white or chartreuse Gulp Swimming Mullets on the outgoing, dragged slow through 15 to 25 feet, has been the play — the fish are stacked where the cooler ocean water meets the warmer outflow, and that seam moves a little with each tide so don't plant yourself in one spot too long. Nothing enormous to report, but a solid mix of 16 to 19 inch fish with the occasional keeper in the 20 to 22 inch class mixed in, which for mid-July isn't bad at all.

Bluefish have been the honest workingman's bite. Peanut bunker showing thick in the wash off Belmar, Spring Lake, and Asbury Park at first light, and the blues have been on them hard enough to see from the boardwalk — small poppers or a 1-ounce metal like a Kastmaster will get bit fast if you're out there before the sun's fully up. Nothing subtle about it. If you want a guaranteed bend in the rod before work, that's your move.

Porgies are keeping the light-tackle crowd honest around the Shark River Inlet bridge and the bulkheads — bottom rigs with clam or squid strips, small hooks, nothing fancy, and it's been steady if unspectacular. Good spot to bring a kid or a buddy who wants to actually catch something without three hours of casting into the wind.

On the pelagic side, I'm watching but not promising anything yet. There's been early chatter about the first bonito and Spanish mackerel signs pushing up the coast on clean incoming water, and if that pattern holds and pushes into our inlets, Shark River and Manasquan on a bright green incoming tide would be the first place I'd look — small metal, size 000 Deadly Dicks, worked fast along the edges. It's early for that around here; most years we don't see real numbers until late August or September. But the water's doing some unusual things this summer, so I'm not ruling out an early taste.

For the week ahead, my plan is simple: fish the PM flood into dusk at Sea Bright and Monmouth Beach through the weekend while the new moon springs are peaking, because that sunset-flood overlap doesn't come around often and it won't last past Monday. If the bass don't show — and jetty fishing being what it is, some nights they just don't — I've got the Manasquan Inlet fluke drift as my fallback, since that bite's been consistent enough on the outgoing to save an otherwise quiet evening. Bring both plans. The rocks don't care which one you had in mind.