Navesink River, NJ Fishing Report & Live Conditions

Navesink River, NJ fishing report

The Navesink is a brackish tidal system that fishes very differently depending on the season. Spring brings the first striped bass push as fish move up from Sandy Hook Bay into the river's deeper channels and around creek mouths like Swimming River and Hubbard Creek. Weakfish show sporadically during warmer springs, often mixed in with the bass. Summer sees fluke stacking in the sand and mud transition zones near channel edges, while bluefish chase bunker pods through the open river. Tautog hold tight to the scattered shell and dock structure year-round, peaking in fall and spring. Kingfish work the sandy shallows on incoming tides during summer and early fall.

On the tides, fish the last two hours of the incoming and the first two of the outgoing, focusing on current seams where creek mouths dump into the main river. Stripers and weakfish respond well to soft plastic shads and bucktails worked slowly through these current breaks, while live grass shrimp is hard to beat for weakfish and kingfish along sandy bottom. Fluke want a moving bait, so drift Gulp on a bottom rig through channel edges. Watch water temperature carefully — once it drops below fifty degrees, shift attention to tautog on green crab fished on structure. Wind against tide creates a chop that often triggers bluefish and stripers to feed aggressively near the surface.