The sun is setting before 8 p.m. and we are not OK with that, and yet, we long for epic fall fishing. Then again, we always long for that and rarely see it. I won’t even speculate anymore how our fall season will produce. Everything changes constantly. You can only speculate on what you see headed this way and guess timelines. Pompano should have been all over us by now, but are slow coming in, due to the upwellings most likely. Any day now it will get better, right?

One thing that never changes is weekday fishing has been more productive than weekend for the surf. But this past weekend, the fishing was better even on a crowded weekend.

The spot bite has been on point. This cooler weather is helping keep more anglers out, increasing catches. Suzanne Martin said, “It was a spot blitz. We hammered them until the tide changed to the outgoing.”

The kayak anglers were seeing tons of spot schools around the flats in Cape Henlopen near the pier. They are getting bigger which is good for the dinner table.

Kristen Lloyd said, “This weekend our son Tucker fished the surf for the first time. He had a great day baiting hooks, casting and catching his own fish. He would yell, ‘Fish on, baby!’ every catch.”

It is great to see kids out there fishing and parents encouraging it - we need more of that. One thing we are seeing less and less of is kids into the hobby, partially due to no one has time to teach them how to fish. Schools need some outdoors programs to get kids more into the outdoors.

The cooler weekend weather had a fleet of boats offshore for flounder. I heard there was over a hundred boats out in one area. That is some pressure on the fish and the angler. This is why we fish weekdays the most and work the weekends. I get more done and better fishing time in when I get that time. The new Fishbites fight club soft plastics are producing nice catches offshore. I’m seeing these out-fish Gulp, too.

I prefer larger baits and rigs offshore. Those fish are looking for a big meal not a little mummichog minnow, which are not found offshore. There are rigs guys use up north (Jersey) that look like the long lake trout rigs in Colorado. These have huge hooks, and lots of blades for flash and noise, the only difference being the large whole squid for bait used for flounder. Big bait equals big fish.

I once saw a guy cast netting mullet, throwing back the larger ones almost cob-sized. I asked why. He said the flounder wouldn’t eat those big fish. An old salt grabbed one, put it on a hook and sent it out. He dropped a doormat on the jetty cap. You could see the outline of that big fish in the side of the flounder. If it fits in a fish’s mouth, they are eating it. General rule for fish. It is one you learn with aquariums when you add fish. If it fits, it gets eaten.

By the way, mullet are showing more around the inland bays and Lewes canal. It won’t be long before they are around the inlets and bay beaches.

Bloodworms are tough to find most weekends, expensive and somewhat sub-par in quality. It’s not the local bait shops’ fault, they can only get what is available. In most cases, shops aren’t making much off the bait just to get people through the door, and also to keep the worms from dying off before they are sold.

Fishbites is your best alternative. Bloodworm formula red or chartreuse works very well. The nuclear chicken crab, sand flea, orange clam and EZ shrimp chartreuse are favorites of mine, too. I use all of these and catch plenty of fish. They all don’t work each day, that part you have to dial in.

Other bait alternatives are shrimp and thick-cut bacon, the fatty part not the meat. Small pieces of bacon will catch fish. There are also plenty of sand fleas and lady crabs to dig up.

Those DS Custom Tackle glow floats work wonders, too, just don’t tell anybody. The new sand flea glow floats look delicious. Product testing (fishing) is my favorite part of this job.

The slot striped bass action has been great around the Delaware Bay, from land, kayaks or boats. Anglers have been doing well, especially in the evenings into night. That ends the 31st of August - get out and slam some slots.

The Point opens soon. All of us peasant tag holders are dying to fish out there on the weekends. It is less crowded in the off-season, well eventually on the weekends. I get to finally see and surf fish with my “summer” friends. I missed all summer working anyway. For some reason, the tackle company is busy this time of year, go figure.

The winners of the White Marlin Open boated a $4.5 million fish on the last day. That is how you win a tournament, on the last day with a world record payout. Nice payday for the angler and boat.

White perch and the usual river suspects are hitting around the waterways. Catfish are jumping, that paddle wheel is ... oh wait, wrong song. Anyway, the fishing inland has been decent. A lot of snakeheads are being landed. Each year, the catches seem bigger and more numerous. Vicious fish. The song “Blackwater” seems appropriate for those fish.

Summer is winding down to second summer. Last year, we were catching the summer suspects into November. I’m not sure we will see that this year. These recent upwellings are really cooling things off.

The upwellings every summer create much cooler water conditions along the coast and into the bays, more so this summer than the past years. Between tides, it is the most noticeable around the bays and some beaches. Over 10-degree temperature fluctuations in Massey’s Ditch, according to the USGS survey station. It is making the fishing a little difficult, and in some cases turned a few species on more. Farther north of us, the water temperatures have hit as low as 57 degrees at the Barnegat Light USGS station in New Jersey.

The Nowcast OFS animation for the Delaware Bay shows just how much cooler in near real-time animation. That cool pool of water below the hotter surface water is known as the Bight’s Cold Pool. That Nowcast OFS is a really neat tool, just Google it.

Upwelling occurs when wind pushes warm surface water away from the coastline. Then cooler water from below, rich in nutrients, comes to the surface or upwells. A great natural indicator of an upwelling, aside from water temperatures dropping dramatically, is when we start seeing a lot of the naked sea butterflies along the beaches. The amount of food pushed toward the shoreline during an upwelling is massive, that food being phytoplankton, which in turn feeds everything else right up to the top of the food chain.

Upwellings are also great at just keeping the hot bathtub water temperatures at bay. The opposite of an upwelling is downwelling. This is when hotter surface water “stacks” up against the coastline by winds. Eventually that hotter water sinks to the bottom, or downwells. We haven’t seen that this year thankfully.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!