Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
Menhaden, or “bunker” as most of us call them around here, are sort of the unsung heroes of our coastal waters. Packed with more oil and bones than the La Brea Tar Pits, it doesn't matter who you are or how hungry you are - no human eats bunker. And since they’re filter feeders that just swim along straining phytoplankton from the water while trying not to get eaten by other fish or caught in a net, bunker are not even good for catch-and-release fishing because they’re not going to bite a line, at least not until the day that someone finds a way to put microscopic plants on a hook!
Just the same, most fishermen are very aware that bunker make an excellent bait, I guess because we know that darn near everything that swims enjoys munching on the little swimming cans of WD-40, including whales, sharks, tuna, bluefish, striped bass, dolphin (the fish AND the mammal), flounder, seatrout and… well you probably get the point – everything!
And bunker seem to be everywhere, from way up in the marshes of the back bays to the canals that run through Ocean City, to 10-15 miles offshore. This time of the season it’s hard to find a place where there aren’t schools of bunker flashing, spinning, and rippling the surface of water as they carry on with their daily antics of chasing down a bellyful of teeny-tiny plant matter while trying to avoid being eaten. Of course, the bunker we all see in the bay are just little guys, and if you pay close enough attention you can just about watch them sprout up over the weeks from June, when one-inch youngsters will go right through the mesh of an average cast net, to four-inch adolescents that will just about swim off with a net if you pitch it over too many at one time.
Ocean waters hold a different class of bunker altogether. Running eight, to maybe twelve-inches, these are adult fish that sometimes show in schools that cover many acres of the ocean’s surface. The thousands and thousands of fish in a single school will often darken the water like shadows from summer clouds, but what’s seen from above is just the tip of the proverbial “iceberg” as the schools can sometimes be more than 30-feet deep. It’s incomprehensible to my simple brain how many fish can be in these schools, let alone off our coast at any give moment of the summer.
Now, back to the subject of fishing. As I’ve already mentioned, anglers know darn well that, for some reason, a lot of sea critters like to eat bunker, therefore, they often make for a good bait. The problem can be catching the darn things and then keeping them alive, or at least in a fresh enough condition that they will still be good bait when we’re ready to use them.
Bunker are stinky, slimy, slippery things that don’t freeze well, turn soft and mushy soon after their death, and even if properly chilled, won’t stay fresh more than a couple days. The best advice is to catch and keep just what you can use today and tomorrow and figure on getting re-supplied every couple of days.
Catching the little bay bunker requires a cast net and the ability to throw it. Then, with net in hand it’s just a matter of walking the docks and bulkheads until a bunch of swirling fish are found close to the surface and then making a cast accurate enough to cover the school. Sometimes the early mornings and late evenings will prove to be the best time to find schooling bunker, but it usually depends upon the location and state of the tide.
Forget about housing them in a little minnow bucket. Bunker need clean water and a lot of room to swim, so keeping them alive requires a decent size bait tank with a healthy exchange of saltwater. Smaller bunker can be used alive or dead, both inshore and offshore, to catch anything that will eat a small fish, from flounder and stripers in the back bays to tuna and dolphin in the canyons. At times they’ve also proven to be a great bait for sea bass over the ocean wrecks.
Though big ocean bunker won’t bite a hook, they can be snagged with treble-hooks rigged above a bank sinker. Cast over the school, let it sink 20 or more feet down and then rip the hooks through the school. Big bunker can be kept for a little while in a live well, but not for long, so if the intention is to use them as live bait, it’s really best to use them right away, otherwise they should be buried in ice and used in the next day or so. Big bunker can be cut up and used in the surf, or anywhere else a chunk-type bait is needed. They can also be fished alive under a float or slow trolled behind a boat.
No one has ever, or will ever, be seen on the cover of a fishing magazine or the Coastal Fisherman holding up a “trophy bunker.” But certainly many of the catches of game fish that have adorned such publications were possible only because of the existence of these “lowly”, but important fish.
Captain Mark Sampson is an outdoor writer and captain of the charter boat “Fish Finder”.
