just a quick note…would like to thank all of you who stopped by our table last night. Your words of encouragement and support mean a lot.

The old mtk shirts were gone last night, for you that expressed interested in the other thread, please tune in on Sunday/Monday and we will give you details how to order them.

In mean time….I am going fishing…

oh yeah,,,,,the WINNER of delicious looking Super Strike weighted needlefish is……

drum roll please

..David Strom

Contact us within 48 hours at info@surfcastersjournal.com with your shipping address

more thoughts on show, Ron Arra, St Croix, and other stuff coming up

Don’t ask me why..I guess Tommy was inspired by the cold front 🙂

So he made two dozen of these shirts for tomorrow’s Fisherman’s Surf Fishing show in Huntington. I think he made one dozen large and one dozen extra large. That is it

We thought we give some of you blog readers a chance to get one. Right now, there is no plans to make ton of them and put them in the online store. In fact, the only way we will make them is if you “pre-order” or reserve them. This is the only color and the back is blank. Picture of Montauk Surfcasters from 1957. Very classis and very cool

Here is the deal. The shirts are $15, figure $2 for ship brings it to $17.

We will only make these in sizes that are reserved on this thread. So if only 3 of you want 2xl than that is all we are going to make. No more, no less. We don’t need your $, just tell us how many and what size you want

So speak now or forever hold your peace:-)

Keep an eye on this cold front coming this Thursday, the temperatures will be dropping drastically overnight. For all of you mullet run fans, this might be the day to hit the beach on the outgoing tide looking for these little suckers.

Speaking of Thursday, there is an annual Fisherman Show and Seminar on tap on Long Island . Crazy Alberto, Bill Wetzel, Paul Melnyk and William Doc Muller are just some of the seminar speakers. Looking forward to seeing some of the familiar faces. If we never meet, stop by our table and say hi. Tommy and I should be there .

If you haven’t picked up Doc’s new book , Surfcaster : The Ultimate Surf Fishing Guide, this is a wonderful chance to pick up a copy and have Doc sign it for you.

Our resident Rod Guru , Lou Caruso from louscustomrods.com asked me to throw this out at you guys. He wants to know what do you guys want him to cover and write about. So if you have a suggestion, chime in, he is always interested in what our readers want to read about.

We have a wonderful giveaway coming your way from the fine folks at Red Gills in few days. We wanted to give you a chance to read trough the new issue of the magazine first before we swamp you with prizes..lol …its coming sometimes next week. Stay tuned…

In tackle store news…most of the stores are getting fresh bunker on regular basis including our supporters LI Outdoorsman and Saltwater’s Tackle…speaking of Outdoorsman, they just had Ralph Votta from Charlie Graves tins re-supply their inventory with his fine tins. There is a rumor that Saltwaters Tackle might carry RM Smith plugs in the near future. East End Tackle has a wonderful contest going on trough the fall, stop by and ask Scott about it. Fisherman’s Headquarters in NJ is reporting some uptick in fish activity on the local beaches. If I was you I’d stop by and check out new Penn Torque bail less..I think you are going to be very, very surprised by this reel…more on that in the near future. Pat at River’s End is of course the ultimate surfcasting headquarters in Connecticut. If I lived any closer I think I’d set up shop in the lot..lol…..Do keep in mind that Pat runs a great Surf Day in March, something you should definitely ad to your calendar.  And of course, Paul at Paulie’s Bait and Tackle is eagerly anticipating your arrival in Montauk. Fish are there and waiting, you are going to have to trust me on this one 🙂 . And last and not least by any means, I have heard that Mark at Cow Harbor Bait and Tackle is now an authorized  Zee Bass dealer and they will be doing servicing and warranty work on LI  so you won’t have to send your reel for servicing in CT…more on zbass coming in near future too

But for today, we will give you a chance (again) to win these new preloaded medium and small needlefish from fine folks at Super Strike. We posted two or three times the winner name and he has never came trough…so we will do this a bit different…in few days we will pick a winner. If he does not responds within 48 hours, we’ll pick the runner up…until we find the home for these delicious looking lures. I am sure that whoever wins these beauties will clean up in the fall with them.

So good luck and thank you goes to folks at Super Strike Lures

Today’s post comes from a guest contributor,  Don Guimelli from Afterhours Custom Lures. Many of you know Don as a great of a guy and excellent lure builder. Enjoy

Plug retrieves

   People are always coming up to me at the shows and asking how I retrieve this plug or that plug. My answer is always the same, vary your retrieve during each and every cast until you discover which the fish likes best. First and foremost, people ask me how slowly I fish a needlefish-. They’re usually surprised when I tell them that I fish a needle slowly less than half the time. I’ll cast a needle out there and let it get to a certain point in the water column then I’ll slowly pump the needle and gather the line. Then I’ll swim it a little faster with deliberate pauses, stop go, stop go. and finally I’ll whip it  like Stevie McKenna does when fishing the sluggo. All this in one cast. This will tell me which retrieve the fish prefer. I believe that when you speed up a plug during a retrieve you will induce reactionary or instinctive strikes.
   I use the same principles when fishing all of my plugs. When fishing a sub-surface metal lip swimmer I believe that you can fool any fish following it to savagely strike thru manipulation. First you want to get the plug down to the depth you think is most productive. Swim the plug at normal speed and then speed it up quickly and then stop it dead in its track-. The plug will slowly raise in the water, add a few subtle twitches and then speed it up again. If a fish is following it will instinctively whack it. We all love fishing pencils on the surface when there are big ‘ole girls around. Again, varying your retrieve will catch you more fish than the standard “pump your rod at the same pace no matter what “. Cast it out, speed it up , slow it down, let it stop all in the same cast and you will catch more fish. Another thing that I’ve noticed, a lot of pencil fishing guys do is they speed up when they miss a fish. I don’t know if it’s all the excitement or what but I feel that in most instances they pull the plug away from the fish. One of the reasons I love sinking pencils is that after a fish strikes and misses I stop the retrieve and feed it to the fish-. More times than not she will inhale it underwater.
   This is just my .02 after a lifetime of fishing and if it helps anyone to have more fun I’ll be very pleased. Remember what the late great Lee Wulff one said ” a gamefish (which I believe striped bass should be) are too valuable to be caught only once”.

.
[issuu width=550 height=213 showHtmlLink=false proSidebarEnabled=true backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=110909055811-4b5c375cab104e5195026dfe8d489310 name=issue9 username=surfcasters_journal tag=fishing unit=px id=54f2a2a6-526b-0113-c7be-f957283b1fce v=2]

from our current issue of the Surfcaster’s Journal Magazine
We know many of you just look at the YouTube button in the magazine and never click it
so we make this easier on you

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cyj45lFPSk[/youtube]

[issuu width=550 height=213 showHtmlLink=false proSidebarEnabled=true backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=110909055811-4b5c375cab104e5195026dfe8d489310 name=issue9 username=surfcasters_journal tag=fishing unit=px id=54f2a2a6-526b-0113-c7be-f957283b1fce v=2]

As you probably read, or hear, or seen, the new issue of the Surfcaster’s Journal Magazine is live for your viewing pleasure. Hope you enjoyed our labor of love. I would also thank the fellow who will remain nameless for sending us a donation. We sincerely appreciate it. As Tommy always said, we’d do this for free. But it helps to be able to at least offset some costs of shipping all the stuff we give away. Again, our sincerest thanks.
We are traveling today, doing some interviews and videos. Yes, this is how we sometimes spend our weekends..will be on the road at 4 am and hopefully back by evening. We’ll eat a lot of junk food, make frequent piss stops due to our uncontrollable urge to drink coffee every 20 minutes and we will probably spill it on ourselves somewhere in CT or RI. But the end result is we get to (hopefully) come up withsome stories for you and few videos too. Yeah, we rather be fishing…..

So here are the winners of this week contest. Let me get it all out of the way in one shot

the winner of a pair of SS Weighted needlefish has not come forward yet. We gave him an extra week to do it because of Hurricane Irene…We will extend our offer till Monday night but then we will give them away to someone else
The winner was Scott Crabtree… bigc_45638@yahoo.com

The winner of Western Filament 300 yards of TufLineXP
Bob Veritys102@optonline.net

The winners of “I LOVE SURFCASTING” and SJ stickers are

CT Matt who guessed 34 who will also receive a St Croix Mojo hat
Ernie who guess the cover
Frank 15 who also guessed 34 will also get stickers

Roger’s third picture which no one guessed is 43

all the winners, please email me your shipping addresses at info@surfcastersjournal.com

.
.
here it is, issue # 9 and still alive..who would have thought ?

We prefer to be quiet when you guys are reading 🙂

[issuu width=550 height=213 showHtmlLink=false proSidebarEnabled=true backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=110909055811-4b5c375cab104e5195026dfe8d489310 name=issue9 username=surfcasters_journal tag=fishing unit=px id=54f2a2a6-526b-0113-c7be-f957283b1fce v=2]

Here we go

Issue # 9 of you favorite magazine is live
Enjoy

.[issuu width=550 height=213 embedBackground=%23c93f36 showHtmlLink=false proSidebarEnabled=true backgroundColor=%23222222 documentId=110909055811-4b5c375cab104e5195026dfe8d489310 name=issue9 username=surfcasters_journal tag=fishing unit=px id=ce4dc09c-9df1-c0c4-54d5-c57ef1e76195 v=2]

I got nothing for you guys today. I am shot, done , caput. Too much video editing over the weekend, too much stress in general. All I can give you today is this

I found these three “I LOVE SURFCASTING” bumper stickers in my basement behind a table. Last three I have

So let’s  have a last issue #8 contest….Roger picked three favorite pictures from issue # 8. You get to choose one picture. First three guys that chose the correct picture will get a I LOVE SURFCASTING sticker..

.

.

.but wait there is more

.

they will also each receive a Surfcaster’s Journal bumper sticker

‘

‘

‘ but wait there is more

‘

‘

‘

One of them will receive this Mojo Surf hat, courtesy of St Croix rods, The Best Rods on Earth, my favorite rods.

.

.That is it…back to bed

.[issuu layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml showflipbtn=true documentid=110704170349-2827722793ce4c5687818e2c7e8e25fa docname=issue_8 username=SURFCASTERS_JOURNAL loadinginfotext=surfcaster’s%20journal%20issue%208 width=600 height=232 unit=px]

I hope all of you are enjoying the Labor Day weekend.

The winner of Super Strike Heavy needlefish never contacted us, however, with the storm and all, maybe he could not. So we will give him few more days to contact us

the winner is Scott Crabtree… bigc_45638@yahoo.com

Ok

The Winners  of West End Tackle Tin giveaways are

• ·       Eugene Pasternak
• terry.bhagan
• rschenkewitz@optonline.net

Each one will receive one lure, courtesy of our friend, Ralph Votta , maker of Charlie Graves lures

All ,please contact us at info@surfcastersjournal.com and send us your shipping address

Congrats to all the winners

For you that are tuning into SJ blog this weekend, we are going to give you a chance to win a 300 yard spool of Western Filament TufLine XP 50 LB test, green. Courtesy of folks from Western Filament…you can visit them at  http://www.tuf-line.com