In The Wash

There is something about knowing that the calendar is working against you, that the opportunities to get out and do what you’ve spent so many months doing are quickly dwindling, that makes every fish feel a little more special.

As the online hellscape and AI make it impossible to even know what’s real anymore, and with us now knowing how important releasing fish healthy is, do accurate measurements even matter anymore?

For those of you who are too far removed from high school math and science class to recall, the title reads “Shads are greater than or equal to bucktails.”

As many of you know- and maybe many of you don’t- I basically despise these things. I just hate them out of principle. They’re dumb.

I am saying this just as much to myself as I am you, the listener of The Surfcast Podcast: now is no time to let down your guard and take it easy in the surf.

The time has come to announce the winner of The Surfcast Podcast Fall Run Giveaway.

But I was thinking last night, what if you turn this on its head. What if you think about what it would be like to always be casting a $1000 lure. Every cast there’s a thousand bucks at the end of your line. Do you have confidence in your knots and line now?

I have gone way, way down the rabbit hole of tail dressings, testing and retesting different plugs with different combinations to the point where I have developed a loose but consistent playbook for what to do to make a particular plug behave exactly the way I want it to.

So this week- and into next week- as you’re thinking about where you might catch fish in this weird, not really a nor’easter, not a hurricane, wind event thingy, I might consider: where are the fish REALLY close?

I know some of you are saying to yourself, “There’s no bad time to fish a bucktail jig,” and you’re not wrong. The thing is, most of my bucktailing is done in outflows—breachways, inlets, drains, and similar areas. I’m just not much of an open-beach bucktail guy. I have plenty of other lures and jigs that I feel outperform a bucktail in the open surf.

Action Alert: Public hearings on Atlantic Menhaden Draft Addendum II begin this week.

Whether you call them bunker, greenbacks, mossbunker, or even pogies, Atlantic menhaden need your help!