July 11, 2013 — Aside from a rare whiting or two, the fish kind of vanished. Until now when the boats fishing for fluke and sea bass suddenly began picking them up frequently around the Klondike or the Sea Girt Reef where Capt. Allen Gonzalez of Reel Class Sportfishing got one in the boat.
Just about any old timer you ask can surely tell you stories of the days they filled burlap sacks full of whiting on night-time winter fishing trips off the New Jersey coast.
Sometimes, the fish made it even easier to be caught.
“They’d get washed up on the beach when they came into the surf to feed on rainfish. You could just pick ‘em up and put ‘em in a basket,” said Capt. Willy Egerter of the Dauntless. “They called them frost fish.”
Then, in the 1980s the whiting, which offered great flavor when smoked, began to disappear. A product of overfishing by the big process boats, Egerter said.
“We used to catch them from Thanksgiving right until spring,” Egerter said. “1992 was the last time we fished for them. After that storm (1992 Nor’easter), they never came back.”
Read the full story at the Asbury Park Press