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How to catch Summer flounder
Summer flounder feed in 56–80°F water and bite best at 62–74°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 7 waters.
About
The fluke: the Northeast's flatfish, ambushing bait on the sand from Virginia to Cape Cod all summer. A five-pound 'doormat' on the ocean wrecks is the trophy, and it's the best fillet in the cooler.
How to fish it
Drift the channel edges and the inlets on a moving tide with a bucktail or a minnow-and-squid rig dragged on the bottom; in late summer the big ones are on the ocean reefs and wrecks.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Mud minnows (killifish)Lip-hooked on a jig head or a 1/0 hook dragged along the bottom — the flounder bait.
SquidStrips on a bottom rig for snapper, grunts and porgies; whole on a deep-drop rig.
Menhaden (pogies)Nose-hooked on a circle hook and free-lined or slow-trolled; cut in chunks for the bottom.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
not confirmed hereRules differ by state — check NJDEP Fish & Wildlife (each state sets its own size, bag and season) before you keep one.
The current rule →Where it is, month by month
Fluke live two lives a year. Summer brings them inshore into the bays, sounds and ocean beaches from the Carolinas to Cape Cod — the season everybody fishes, drifting bucktails and squid strips along channel edges and over structure. In fall, as the water cools, they move offshore to the continental shelf and spawn on the way out from September into the winter, and they spend the cold months near the shelf edge off the Mid-Atlantic. In spring they come back into the bays as the water warms. The biggest 'doormats' sit on the deeper ocean wrecks and reefs late in the summer.