Surf fishing books

[hookedonbass]

Have a friend who wants to read up on surf fishing. Are there any good books out there?

[Monty]

These 3 books are excellent books by two great people.

Zeno Hromin's
The Art of Surfcasting With Lures

DJ Muller's
The Surfcaster’s Guide to the Striper Coast
Striper Strategies

Have a friend who wants to read up on surf fishing. Are there any good books out there?

[bababooey]

Zeno Hromin's
The Art of Surfcasting With Lures

What Monty said, read Zeno's book, some great knowledge there.

[hookset]

I want "20 years on the Cape" By: Frank Daignault Heard it is a great book.

[voyager35]

Might want to check out Doc Mullers book Fishing with Bucktails if you want to learn how to better use bucktails. Very informative.

[clamchucker]

Might want to check out Doc Mullers book Fishing with Bucktails if you want to learn how to better use bucktails. Very informative.

This is an excellent book. More of the younger guys should try their hand at bucktails. They are one of the most versatile presentations out there.

[nitestrikes]

Zeno just came out with a new book. He was smart in including chapters and articles by some of the best surfcasters out there, past and present.

Check out his book if you get a chance.

[strikezone31]

On the Run: An Angler's Journey Down the Striper Coast
David Dibenedetto

Saw this listed on Amazon. Story about a guy who travels down the east coast for stripers. Looks like a good read. I have to add it to my list.

Night Tides: The Striper Fishing Legend of Billy the Greek
Michael G. Cinquemani

This one is about a LI Fisherman, boat, surf and bridge details.

[BassBuddah]

Anyone read that book? Reading reports about 50 and 60's at the cbbt got me thinking how great it would be to follow them from Maine to NC. Family committments and job somehow seem to get in the way. My best is to hit Montauk as much as I can.

What's the farthest you would travel for a decent bass? Anyone ever do the whole run along the east coast?

[bababooey]

There is a comprehensive book called striper wars by
**** Russell. Check out the review, worth reading.




Striper Wars: An American Fish Story



2008-04-24 12:03:19 - Striper Wars is an extensive and complete tale of the past fifty years of management practices regarding the striped bass on the Eastern coast.

It is told in the first person narrative by the author **** Russell, a journalist who got his start at Sports ]Illustrated, who spent the better part of two decades using every available resource he could muster to call attention to the striped bass over-fishing crisis. **** Russell began his crusade to save the bass in the early 1970s after
falling in love with the fish years earlier when he caught his first. However, the story Russell tells begins long before his own involvement in the fish's epic journey.

The first story takes place in the 1950s when Consolidated Edison, New York City's electricity supplier, wanted to build a hydroelectric plant at the base of Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. When it was discovered that this plant was killing tens of thousands of stripers and secretly carting the carcasses off to landfills, state government stepped in to put a nix on Con Ed's plant. In terms of the full story of the striped bass fishery (a story whose ending is still unwritten) the ordeal at Storm King is a mere blip on the timeline. It raised awareness and started a trend of protecting the fishery, but many more monumental problems occurred not too long after.

The main plight of the striped bass was over-fishing. It was early in the 1960s, Russell writes, that the subject of striper over-fishing was first brought up. The scientist that raised the question was Bob Pond, but he was laughed at for suggesting what seemed to be a ludicrous notion at the time to most people. Russell's involvement in the issue began not long after this, first using his position at Sports Illustrated to raise awareness but then branching much further out to really alert people of the crisis. Russell made friends with many legislators, sports fishermen, and scientists who joined together in the campaign.

Russell sat down with scientists like Bob Pond, John Boreman, and Jim Uphoff many times to discuss the striped bass issue and also was present during a lot of the research and sampling that led to these scientists boldly proclaiming that the striped bass fishery was at a near breaking-point. Russell was a main trumpeter of the cause, involving himself in organizations comprised of a wide array of concerned citizens; from postal worker Jim White to bait and tackle shop owners like Joe Mollica. These small organizations fought hard at the local level to try to stop commercial fisherman in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maryland from taking a dangerous amount of stripers from the ocean.

It was an extremely hard fight for these concerned citizens to win. On one side there were the small organizations headed by sports fisherman and conservationists and on the other side there were the commercial fishermen who needed to extract stripers from the water in order to earn a living. According to Russell tension would really run high at the meetings. At one such meeting lifelong striper fishermen George Mendonsa retorted to a claim that the stripers were diminishing in numbers by saying 'You can't tell me there's no bass around! I caught more last year than my family ever has-130,000 pounds!' A conservationist at the meeting yelled back that if that was true then Mendonsa was personally responsible for the annihilation and destruction of the striped bass. This remark caused people on both sides of the issue to stand up in arms.

These small organizations in the mid-Atlantic and New England states grew in numbers and could not be ignored. Their main goal was to get states that were involved in commercial striper fishing to put limits on size and number of bass that boats could keep. Battles were won in most states that resulted in the minimum size for a legal striped bass to increase from 12 inches to 18 inches. It turned out that this six-inch difference would not be enough to save the fishery however and the smaller organizations turned to the state governments to intervene and place harsher restrictions on the fishery. Russell, among others, spoke to congressmen in several coastal states about introducing legislation that would again increase the minimum length of fish that could be kept. Eventually a complete moratorium was put on keeping any striper of any length from the Chesapeake waters. In Rhode Island and New York fish had to be 38 inches to keep. The moratorium worked and through the late 1980s and 1990s the striped bass fishery miraculously recovered.

That, as Russell writes, was not near the end of the crisis for the striped bass. Now they are facing different problems. In the late 1990s when striper catch peaked again, people began realizing that the fish were thinner than they should be, as a result of not having enough to eat. The main source of food for stripers is anchovy and menhaden, two fish that have an incredible amount of commercial pressure put on them. Most of the menhaden catch is ground up and used as feed for farm animals. Farm animals and farms in general are another cause of alarm for striped bass. There are numerous farms along the Chesapeake, the main breeding ground for stripers, which dump incredible amounts of nutrients into the water via runoff. As a result there are enormous algal blooms in the bay and very poor dissolved oxygen levels, which are bad for striped bass. In the past these algal blooms have been suppressed by the menhaden, which feed them; but with the over-extraction of menhaden (which are being used to feed the farm animals which produce the nitrogen and phosphorus in the first place) not only is there not enough to eat for the bass, but there is very little breeding ground left. It is a terrible cycle that is estimated to cost as much as $28 billion dollars to correct.

The only thing lacking from the book is a happy ending, but that cannot be blamed on Russell. He does an excellent job of holding the reader's interest from cover to cover. His writing style, developed at Sports Illustrated and honed over the past thirty years, is quite readable for anyone. The hundreds of anecdotes in the book are told masterfully and the reader can really appreciate all the emotion that Russell and others have devoted to save this fish that has so clearly impacted all of them personally. The reader does not need to have a background in fisheries to understand this book, nor do they need to have even seen a striped bass before to admire how indefatigable they are; and to begin to understand some of their magic that so many people seem to believe they possess. This book was written for the everyday person so that a larger audience can come to understand the importance of striper fisheries . It is definitely a good thing that Russell is not himself a scientist, but a journalist by trade. In many regards he is just an interested observer that became more involved in an interest than most people normally do.

Striper Wars is a powerful book, and while it is an extremely important account of the entirety of the striped bass fishery it is also a vital compilation of the embodiment of all fisheries stories, and even conservation as a whole. I highly recommend it as a crucial read to any person with no knowledge of fisheries conservation and I also recommend it to those who do have background in conservation, but are looking to expand their library and gain a new view on management practices.

[vpass]

Just finish reading both of Zeno's books. Lots of good info. I recommand both books. I just started reading D.J. Muller books "The Surfcaster's Guide to the Striper coast". It shaping up to be a good book also.

[Great South Bay Bucktails]

On the run is a must read

All Franks books are a must read
DJ"s books also !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[GeoffT]

What Monty said, read Zeno's book, some great knowledge there.

As long as you understand this book is relatively geared to Long Island.

[williehookem]

This isn't really about surf fishing, but without bunker where would we be?


With its putrid smell, bony flesh and rancid oily taste, the menhaden would seem the least likely candidate for “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” the title of H. Bruce Franklin’s brilliant new environmentalist study. But Franklin is not being ironic. The menhaden is the most important fish in the sea if you understand its ecological purpose.
While it is understandable that groups like Greenpeace would take up the cause of sea creatures at the top of the food chain, like the great whales or the bluefin tuna, Franklin understands that without the easily dismissed menhaden, those above it on the food chain do not stand a chance. This includes the human race as well, since the menhaden is particularly suited to cleaning up plankton-ridden waters. As one of the few marine specimens that thrive on microscopic plant life or phyloplanton, it is uniquely positioned to purify waters that have become virtual swamps as a result of the massive influx of nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms, lawns and golf courses. With much of the Gulf of Mexico having been turned into a vast dead zone by fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River, there is a drastic need for the humble menhaden.

The villain in “The Most Important Fish in the Sea” is industrial fishing in general and a particularly odious company called Omega Protein, whose website informs us that they “market a variety of products derived from menhaden, an inedible fish found in abundant quantities in coastal waters off the U.S. mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.” It might be inedible to human beings, but fish love to eat them.

Franklin explains that what makes them unappealing to human beings has an irresistible appeal to prized food fish, including the striped bass and the bluefish. Once the menhaden eat phytoplankton, they convert it into omega-3 fatty acids that all living creatures require but are available from only limited sources, such as flaxseed, soybeans and walnuts. Unfortunately, the striped bass and the bluefish cannot stroll into the local grocery store to pick up a bag of walnuts.

Reading Omega Protein’s website, one would get the impression that they are mainly in the health food business. “Omega Protein is the nation’s largest producer of Omega-3 fish oil, protein rich fish meal, and fish solubles.”

What they don’t tell you is that most of what they produce ends up as chicken or pig feed.

Chickens and pigs of course can flourish on other foodstuffs, but the striped bass and the bluefish cannot.

Like most corporations, Omega has one and only one goal and that is to make a profit. The top stock holders could probably care less if the ocean was turned into a vast dead zone as long as they are prospering.

As a symbol of the irrationality of the capitalist system and the looming environmental crisis that threatens all life, it is difficult to imagine a more cold-blooded and criminal outfit than Omega.
Omega was originally a subsidiary of the Zapata Corporation that was launched by George H.W Bush in 1953 as Zapata Oil. It sold off Omega in 2006 to Wilber L. Ross, a leveraged buyout expert.

So it should be obvious where this outfit inherited its corporate ethics. If they could make money processing human flesh, they probably would.

H. Bruce Franklin first found out about the menhaden plight on salt water fishing expeditions off the New Jersey coast and in Chesapeake Bay, where Omega still has the right to use industrial fishing techniques to catch millions of the endangered menhaden. Deprived of the menhaden, the local game fish were showing signs of malnutrition:

This first fish looked healthy and normal enough to me, though I wasn’t used to seeing stripers this small being kept (the minimum Chesapeake size was eighteen inches, compared to the New Jersey minimum then of twenty-four inches, and now of twenty-eight inches). But Joe pointed out a small, rather unremarkable lesion near the anus, something I would have missed. This rockfish was the healthiest-looking we caught, however, except for one. The next fish, with bright red open sores gnawing deep into its side and belly, gave me a taste of that revulsion Jim must have felt back in 1997. One after the other, we caught diseased rockfish, each with horrifying symptoms.

If Omega Corporation only considers the menhaden in terms of what Karl Marx called “exchange value”, the original inhabitants of the New World–being primitive communists–were far more tuned in to its “use value”. They understood that the menhaden and other fish had enormous value as fertilizer and taught the pilgrims to bury them near corn. The Narragansett Indians called them munnawhatteaûg, which meant “fertilizer” or “that which manures”.

Not only are the menhaden useful as fertilizer, their oil can be used in the same way that whale oil was used in the 1800s–as a lubricant and as fuel. Not surprisingly, this led to the same kind of industrialized fishing techniques that came close to wiping out the whale. The menhaden were also reduced to a relative handful as vast purse nets in offshore waters on the Atlantic Coast yielded billions of fish.

When alarms were raised about their possible extinction, the 19th century versions of Julian Simon dismissed them as chicken-little stories as Franklin’s epigraph to chapter five (”The Death of Fish and the Birth of Ecology”) would indicate:

I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to say, that nothing we do-seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to be useless.
–Thomas Henry Huxley, 1883

Considering the New York Times’s long-standing record of hewing closely to the agenda of corporate America, it is totally to be expected that they would repeat Huxley’s argument. When evidence began to mount in the early 1880s that the menhaden were being fished into extinction, the newspaper of record tried to get the commercial fishing industry off the hook:

It has been shown over and over again that man’s take of the sea fishes is utterly insignificant when the whole bulk of the fish is considered. Predaceous fish and birds, all the natural enemies of the fish, destroy more perhaps in a single hour than man captures in the year.

Although most of H. Bruce Franklin’s impressive scholarship is focused on the records of newspaper, magazine, industry associations and government agencies over the past 125 years or so, he does make one foray into popular culture that demonstrates this scholar’s eclectic and multifaceted approach (he has written on science fiction).

He notes that a Simpson’s episode from 1997 very possibly alluded to the menhaden crisis. C. Montgomery Burns, the nuclear power plant owner that employs Homer Simpson and an all-round villain, launched a new business that sounds a lot like Omega. Trying to pull the wool over Homer’s daughter Lisa, a committed environmentalist and vegetarian, he has come up with something called “Li’l Lisa’s Patented Animal Slurry”, a high-protein feed for farm animals, insulation for low-income housing, a powerful explosive, and a top-notch engine coolant.

When Lisa tells Burns that he is up to something evil, he responds, “I don’t understand. Pigs need food, engines need coolant, dynamiters need dynamite…and not a single sea creature was wasted.”

... especially the opening paragraphs of “The Most Important Fish in the Sea,” which is very likely the most important book you will read this year:

First you see the birds—gulls and terns wheeling overhead, then swooping down to a wide expanse of water dimpled as though by large raindrops and glittering with silver streaks. The sea erupts with frothy splashes, some from the diving birds, others from foot-long fish with deeply forked tails frantically hurling themselves out of the water, only to fall back into their tightly packed school. More and more birds materialize as if from nowhere, and the air rings with their shrill screams. Boats too begin to converge on the scene: the boiling cloud of birds has told anglers everywhere within view that a school of menhaden, perhaps numbering in the tens of thousands, is being ravaged by a school of bluefish.

Attacking from below and behind to slash the menhaden bodies with their powerful jaws, the razor-toothed blues are in a killing frenzy, gorging themselves with the severed backs and bellies of their prey, some killing even when they are too full to eat, some vomiting half-digested pieces so they can kill and eat again.

Terns skim gracefully over the surface with their pointed bills down, dipping to pluck bits of flesh and entrails from the bloody swirls. Gulls plummet and flop heavily into the water, where a few splash about and squabble noisily over larger morsels. As some lift with their prizes, the squabbles turn aerial and a piece occasionally falls back into the water, starting a new round of shrieking skirmishes.

Hovering high above the other birds, a male osprey scans for targets beneath the surface, then suddenly folds its gull-shaped wings and power-dives through the aerial tumult, extends its legs and raises its wings high over its head an instant before knifing into the water in a plume of spray, emerges in another plume, and laboriously flaps its four-foot wingspan as it slowly climbs and soars away with a writhing menhaden held headfirst in its talons.

Beneath the blues, iridescent weakfish begin to circle, snapping at small lumps sinking from the carnage. Farther below, giant but toothless striped bass gobble tumbling heads and other chunks too big for the mouths of the weakfish. From time to time, bass muscle their way up through the blues, swallow whole menhaden alive, and propel themselves back down with their broom-like tails, leaving telltale swirls on the surface. On the mud below, crabs scuttle to scavenge on leftovers.

[DarkSkies]

Fin lent me this book a few years ago, and then let me have it for keeps, when I kept putting off returning it to him....

What a guy that grouchy basstid is.,...ain't he?

The reason I like it is because it is direct and to the point. It methodically goes over everything you need to know to become a better Surf and Jetty Fisherman...and Milt did it years before the latest crop of Authors wrote their books....

Although each new book by a new author tries to make their particular take on the subject new and refreshing, Fin has pointed out, over and over, how a lot of the Authors who came after Milt, if you look at some of the current books, seem to have the same exact chapters that Milt did in his book.....


That's not to detract away from the folks who are now writing "How To" books, as some of them are quite good...but merely a recognition that Milt and others of his generation, said it first....


I was in Sea Bright a few weeks ago and the old timers still hold Milt Rosco and guys like John Geisinger in high regard....while I'm afraid a lot of 20-something surf guys may have tunnel-vision and have never heard of these great Authors.....so I'm trying to do my part to tell folks about them...





Here is a copy of Milt's book.
I encourage all new guys who have an interest in learning more, to devour every page of that book like it's your last meal....

Attachment 14877


Attachment 14878


Milt also talks about some old-school techniqies like the "Sneaky-Pete" fluke rig developed and carried by Ernie Wuesthoff, another great old-time fisherman and previous owner of the "Nautical Shop" in Mantoloking, NJ..... (RIP Ernie)

Lots of little tidbits like that in the book...take a look at it when ya's get a chance....

And for those who still want to see and meet Milt, he will be giving a seminar at SurfDay, at Brookdale Community College, on Feb 25,,,one of the NJ Saltwater Legends, for sure....

[dogfish]

I read it. All meat and potatoes. No veggies, which is good thing. Good book.

[mick2360]

Anything by Milt Roscoe is worth reading; a very knowledgeable fisherman. He is one of the last of the old school guys and very much worth a few bucks to pick up his work.

I didn't like the Greek's book much, it was written by a friend of his and had a hero worshiping angle to it. The Greek is one heck of a fisherman and has dedicated his life to his craft, so he gets big credit. I just had a distaste for the tone of the book. I didn't need to be reminded that here was a great angler (in comparison to most of the rest of us) every other paragraph. I DID enjoy the few references to the dark art of bridge fishing midway through the book.

[DarkSkies]

Mick, thanks for the kind words about Milt. He really helped to broaden the experiences and catches of a whole generation of guys. I wanted to put his name out there again because he's speaking at Surf Day and it would be a great opportunity for the younger guys to learn from someone I consider one of the NJ legends. Although he's not climbing the rocks anymore, he still makes regular trips from Sandy Hook to Manasquan. It's amazing to watch him in action, and his writing skills have entertained many....


As for the Night Tides book, you're the 2nd person to make comments like that...I had to look at my original post and re-assess. I think you have a good point there...I've met Billy in person and found him an entertaining and engaging speaker...he's a "No-BS" kind of guy....but when you have a book written from the perspective of "Hey this guy is a hero, here's why...." I can see where that would turn some people off.

Thanks for the comments, hope to see ya soon!

[plugaholic]

I ordered that book this weekend. Thanks for the recommendation guys.

[surfstix1963]

Old School Gentlemen I remember as a kid sitting in my grandfathers den reading articles by Milt & Matt Ahern in his massive collection of the Fisherman they were simplistic fisherman as was my grandfather he use to say you don't need all of those "Bells & Whistles fluke fishing just a hook and sinker.Later on when I was out on my own and was struggling it always popped in my mind dump the jewelry and catch some fish.Matt was very involved with the "Send a Kid Fishing" program which I always donate to just something I believe in.When I was younger cutting lawns I would take a dollar from every cut and put it in a jar and then donate it.Fishing sometimes needs to fall into the K.I.S.S. system overthinking the situation wastes too much fishing time.