The Midnight Rambler
John Papciak
Remembering Frost Fish
(updated 2013)
You know you must be getting old when the fishing you did as a kid sounds far-fetched by today’s standards.
I sit here today with an interesting challenge – trying to convince SJ readers that there was a time when surf fishing didn’t stop in November or December – we simply changed gear for winter fish.
As strange as this might sound, winter used to mean some of the best local fishing of the year – whiting!
I was introduced to whiting fishing at an early age. I remember my father coming home from work early on Saturday afternoons. I remember him trying to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before loading the car for a night whiting trip. My brother and I, so excited about the prospect of going fishing, never let the poor man get a wink. I remember putting on two pairs of long johns and three pairs of socks, maybe four if I could still squeeze my foot into the boots.
We did most of our winter fishing on party boats out of Atlantic Highlands, Belmar and Point Pleasant New Jersey. But the boats from Sheepshead Bay New York were most certainly in on it too.
There was a very active surf fishery along the NY Bight, but some of the Montauk old timers recall catching whiting on darters under the light.
One of the earliest accounts of winter surfcasting can be found in the 1909 book “FISHING AROUND NEW YORK: WHERE TO FIND THEM” by JW MULLER and ARTHUR KNOWLSON: “…Schools of whiting run close along the surf of Long Island and New Jersey in the winter especially at night. At such times the fish are generally in mad pursuit of the little silver sand launt and they crowd so closely to shore that the surf often throws them on the beach. Fishermen take the whiting in cold weather at night by wading along shore with torches and spearing or scooping them with nets as they dash through the surf…”
I wouldn’t call it the hey day, but my fondest memories of winter surfcasting took place in the 1970s, along North Jersey beaches, especially in the vicinity of the Long Branch Fishing Pier.
One of the most memorable nights was around 1976, on a Point Pleasant party boat. We anchored close to the beach. We were well within casting distance from the sand and I remember seeing people fishing from the beach. On this night, the whiting pushed bait into the wash, the result was a full-on February blitz as the sun went down.
Other nights, while surf fishing was still viable, the better fishing took place closer to New York Harbor, just inside of the Ambrose Tower. 
Many nights we were closer to Sandy Hook, about 3 miles off, in an area known as Scotland Grounds. This was a shoal and the former site of a lightship that marked a 1866 shipwreck involving a vessel of the same name. (My father was kind of a maritime history buff, and he fed us with plenty of old salty sea stories whenever there was any fishing down time).
We used cut herring as bait, and on some cold nights we had to hold the bait in our hands in order to keep it from freezing. I remember the rig, it was four hooks. The top three were for herring strips, the bottom hook for clam. The top hooks caught the whiting, the bottom hook took the ling and the stray cod (yes, cod at night). It was not unusual to have a double, maybe even a triple header.
On the coldest nights my younger brother used to drop his bait to the bottom, then put the rod in the rod holder and go inside the heated cabin by the window to watch for a strike. Sometimes he would not come back out until he had warmed up, regardless of how the rod tip was bouncing. It didn’t matter, there were plenty of fish. I remember the term baseball bat whiting, and I remember that some fish did indeed approach that size.
Then I remember shoveling snow off the picnic table in the back yard, so that I could clean all those fish the following morning. Some would be baked, others pan fried. With that white flaky meat, they were even good as a cold left-over, as a TV snack. We didn’t have a smoker, but I’ve had more than my share of smoked whiting.
Now, with another winter upon us, I continue to wonder if it will ever be possible to experience anything like again in our lifetimes.
I have been involved in Striped Bass conservation efforts, but I still feel that many of our problems actually began with the loss of fisheries like whiting. With no winter bottom fishery, effort shifted, and today it remains concentrated on what remains.
And as time passes, we experience the phenomenon of “shifting baseline syndrome,” where today’s fishermen have no concept of just how things used to be.
Today whiting still ranks as one of the top fish in terms of volume in NY commercial markets. While LI east end commercial operators have been able to maintain a foothold in this shadow of a fishery, recreational fishermen, particularly those in the New York Bight, have been completely removed from the equation.
The last whiting I caught from the surf was in 1991.
