During the spring run of striped bass, it’s not uncommon for anglers who live on the water, and more specifically, on backwater canals and lagoons, to see striped bass lazily swimming beneath the dock lights at night. Nick D’Eufemia, who goes by @nj.fish on Instagram, has enjoyed casting to these “dock pets” for the past week as they slurp down cinder worms in the evening hours. The cinder worm hatch is an annual occurrence, and come a certain time each season, stripers from schoolie to over-slot size gorge on these worms as they spawn over muddy bottom in salt ponds and estuaries. But over the weekend, D’Eufemia spotted an unexpected visitor feeding alongside the dock-light stripers: a large rainbow trout.
D’Eufemia lives on a brackish creek in the northern end of Barnegat Bay near the Point Pleasant Canal. The closest trout-stocked water to his home is the Metedeconk River, and despite his proximity to the Metedeconk, he has never seen or heard of trout being caught in his area of the bay. “For this trout to be in our creek, it had to swim all the way down the Metedeconk from where it was stocked, through the brackish water and into the bay, then hook a turn through the Canal and into our lagoon,” said D’Eufemia. “It’s possible that the fish could have made a longer journey, coming south from Toms River or possibly even the Manasquan, which are almost equidistant from where I live. But the more likely case is that it dropped out of the Metedeconk.”
D’Eufemia noted that despite all the recent rain, water clarity has been good in the lagoon, so he has been spotting bass regularly in the dock lights. However, the bass are a bit more wary of feeding in the lights than this stocked trout. “Stripers tend to hang 3 or 4 feet down, so you can just make out their profiles as they cruise through the lights,” D’Eufemia said. “The other night, I came home to find my dad and brother casting to bass that were breaking the surface as they fed on cinder worms, and after a few minutes, I noticed something funky looking swimming around in the lights with the bass.” His brother, who was casting soft plastics to the finicky bass, got a bite from the unusual subject, but the fish spit the hook. “It came through the light maybe a dozen times to feed on cinder worms, and that’s when we realized it was a sizable rainbow trout.”
After identifying the mystery fish, D’Eufemia grabbed a light freshwater setup—a 2500-size Daiwa spinning reel spooled with 6-pound braid and 6-pound fluorocarbon leader on 7-foot Phenix M1—and got to casting. “I had small 1/16th-ounce VMC jighead, so my brother moved away from the lights and netted a big cinder worm for me, which I threaded onto the jighead.”
After twitching it around in the water column beneath the lights for a few minutes, the trout showed no interest. It wasn’t until D’Eufemia dropped the worm to the bottom and held it dead still that he felt the bite. He set the hook, the line started running, and it was on. A couple minutes later, he was holding the lost salmonid in his own two hands.
In places like Connecticut, Massachusetts, and even certain streams on Long Island, sea-run brook and brown trout are occasionally caught in tidal portions of rivers, but according to D’Eufemia, it is very rare for it to happen in New Jersey. He recalled one salt-run rainbow trout being caught years ago, which was posted to Instagram by Fishermen’s Supply in Point Pleasant Beach.
After a quick picture, D’Eufemia released the trout back into the lagoon, where it returned to the lights to keep feeding on spawning cinder worms for another 10 minutes. “The stripers are wise enough not to fully reveal themselves when they’re feeding in the lights, but as we know, stocked trout are not the brightest bunch,” he chuckled. “I’m sure there are probably weakfish and white perch out there feeding with the bass; and who knows, maybe there are even a couple more sea-run trout, too.”
