November is striper time in New Jersey. Schools of striped bass that have remained in waters farther north finally return to the waters of coastal New Jersey, to be greeted by many a waiting angler. Once November rolls around, I try to get down to the beach as often as I can. Given that the steelhead rivers of the Great Lakes are at least four to five times a farther drive for me, these returning stripers are the best show in town. For the last couple of years, I've been making due with a mutli-tip line system that ventures to be, and accomplishes doing so fairly well, a line system that can fit any purpose. Even though this multi-purpose line hasn't been a thorn in my side, it also isn't ideal and I've known for some time that I wanted to start fishing lines specifically tailored for the task at hand. The reasons are obvious, so I won't go into them here.

Most often, when fishing for stripers, I'll fish an intermediate line. Something that sinks at around 1-3 inches per second. However, in New Jersey and elsewhere, a good deal of my fishing is done from jetties. When fishing from the jetty or in particularly rough surf, I'll often prefer to use a full sink line. On a few recent, premature trips to the beach in search of stripers that hadn't yet shown up, I had the chance to test out Airflo's Sniper Sink 7. This is one of Airflo's fastest sinking cold saltwater lines. Unlike the Ridged Striper series of lines in Airflo's cold saltwater lineup, this line is un-ridged. If you're unfamiliar with Airflo's ridge system, it is a unique style of fly line coating that allows for tremendous shootability.

Raritan Bay is home base for many of New York and New Jersey’s fishermen. In season fishermen leave the many marinas that dot the bay shore of Staten Island, Monmouth and Middlesex county and head out to the bay in search of striped bass, bluefish, summer flounder (fluke) and other game fish. In order to have a successful day on the bay, anglers look for baitfish. Find the bait, you find the gamefish. The predominant baitfish in Raritan Bay is bunker (formally known as Atlantic Menhaden), both large adults and immature small bunker that we call “peanuts”. Without bunker in the water, you might as well play golf.

Ranked right up there with the Chesapeake and Delaware bays, Central New Jersey’s Raritan Bay is one of the predominant nurseries/estuaries for Atlantic Menhaden stocks. Bunker spawn out at sea and the fry get caught up in the currents and ride them into the back bays and estuary areas where they stay the summer and grow larger until fall. The adult bunker are herring-like fish which swim together in very large schools and feed on micro-organisms like algae, copepods and plankton. They are a lynchpin in the ecology of the bay – converting the micro organisms into flesh and becoming a protein enriched package for our carnivorous fish, marine mammals and marine birds.