Tom P.

Northern kingfish, known as “royals” by the legions of surf anglers from Cape May through Seaside, have been appearing in numbers.

You can’t say you didn’t know it was coming.

And they are being pulled big time!

“Northern puffer” in fisheries parlance, the blowfish is enjoying another population boom after the last couple of years when counts seemed on the wane.

Actually, going deep is now the way to clean doormats and area rugs, i.e. flatties in the 10-lb. and 12-lb. ranges, respectively.

This is the time during the spring-through-autumn fishing frenzy season that we take a breather, and back it down a bunch of notches.

Depending on where you’re dropping a trap or hand line, crabbing has been fair to excellent. As the summer progresses, figure it to hit good to super status, again, predicated on the venue.

In reference to the 1967 #1 pop hit by The Turtles, it’s indeed a happy time when one observes a box turtle in the garden or lawn.

Fun time, for sure: cook-outs, camping, backwoods fishing, hiking, trail biking, camping...all which, one way or another, sooner or later, puts one on a collision course with what has become a scourge of the Garden State outdoors scenes: ticks.

There is no better time than from when you’re reading this through June 22, the last day of the segmented sea bass season, to hop on a vessel and get in on the drop ‘n reel fishing and the post trip tongue-slap-yer-brains-out dinners and fried fish sandwiches.

The Little Italy, Resor, Cole and Triple Wrecks are but a few of the locations loaded with sashimi.

It’s prime bass time, and I’m not referring to the striped kind nor the sea kind, but the bigmouth kind!