View from Deal, New Jersey: An array of jetties looking south toward Asbury Park.

My cell phone rang while I was waiting at Wall St. to board the commuter ferry back to New Jersey. It was Abe and he was shouting into the phone.

At first I couldn’t make out what he was saying. There was booming surf in the background, so I could guess why he was calling.

“Big cows, Dave!” Abe shouted. “The surf’s lousy with ‘em!”

Abe went on to say that striped bass had been hitting the beach almost daily for the past several weeks, and they were going off as we spoke. I finally got him to slow down and tell me where he was fishing before he started screaming again because he had another fish on.

Here’s a cow that this angler released.

I didn’t think I could make it to the beach before the blitz ended, but an hour later, as the ferry was landing at the Atlantic Highlands Municipal Marina, I called Abe anyway. He was still into the action. I raced home, changed my clothes, grabbed a rod, picked up my surf bag, strapped on my Korkers and headed to the Roosevelt Avenue jetty four blocks away.

Roosevelt Avenue, in the manicured, seaside town of Deal, New Jersey, has one of the few remaining rock groins that surfcasters can access along the Monmouth County beaches. When I arrived, Abe was leaving because of a family obligation. The fish were no longer showing but he assured me that they were still there. As Abe stowed his rod in the back of his SUV he shouted, “Just cast a big popper and you’ll find them.”

He wasn’t lying. Within 15 minutes I was hooked up to one of the biggest striped bass I had ever caught, from the beach or a boat.

For the past five years the coast of Monmouth County has been the scene of some of the greatest striped bass fishing since the 1970s. Local surfcasters, who are some of the most dedicated along the entire eastern seaboard, could only dream they would see it again, but now their dream has come true.

Anglers battle big stripers under bait schools.

The Monmouth County shoreline stretches some 40 miles from Sandy Hook to Brielle and was long known amongst the northeastern surf-fishing fraternity for its abundant rock jetties. However the Army Corps of Engineers began a beach replenishment project about a decade ago and in the process breached or covered most of the jetties. Ironically, these are the very jetties the Corps constructed 60 years ago to prevent the same beaches from eroding. This has forced New Jersey surfcasters to focus their attention on that stretch of beach where the jetties are still intact. Miraculously, the run of uber stripers is concentrated along that stretch. The main area of interest is some 9 miles of coast from Monmouth Beach in the north to Asbury Park in the south.

Landing a fish calls for more than the right lure. It takes balance!

From early to mid-June through the first or second week of July, these 25- to 40-plus-pound cows (likely post-spawn females from Chesapeake Bay) file in to feed in these fertile waters. Fertile because, since the banning of commercial menhaden netting from inshore New Jersey waters in 2002, this extremely important forage species is once again giving big stripers a reason to visit.