Keeper flounder still stacking up in Delaware Bay

What's biting

What's next

With early-September rain behind us and Eric Burnley noting the bite held steady from croaker to tilefish despite the muddied inshore water, expect Delaware Bay's flounder and weakfish action to keep building over the next two to three days as water clarifies on the incoming tides. Higbee's Bait and Tackle and Big Dave's Tackle are both seeing keeper flounder in the 22-to-23-inch class, and that class of fish should stay in play through the week — mid-tide drifts with live minnows, spearing, or squid strips remain the go-to presentation on both the ocean and back-bay sides of the reef sites.

Bluefish and weakfish, pushed onto the beaches and jetties by the heavy bait loads Hands Too Bait and Tackle is reporting from the bay down to Cape May and the Wildwoods, should keep firing on soft plastics and bloodworms for weakfish and hard plastics or cut bait for blues, especially on the last two hours of an outgoing tide when bait gets flushed past the points. Watch for that pattern to hold or intensify as nights cool into mid-September and baitfish continue staging for their fall exodus.

Striped bass are still mostly a back-bay story right now — Hands Too Bait and Tackle notes fish moving onto the sod banks, and Smith's Bait Shop has small stripers mixed with croaker at the Woodland Beach pier on bloodworms and Fishbites. As water temperatures ease down through September, expect that presence to grow and stripers to start showing more consistently on the bay side of the beaches and around the reef structure, though it's early for a true push.

Port Mahon boat traffic working the Mid-Bay reef sites should keep producing a mixed bag of croaker, flounder, and trout on live minnows or jigs tipped with squid or cut bait, per Smith's Bait Shop — that pattern is typically reliable into early fall and worth planning a weekend trip around if you're fishing structure rather than the surf.

The waning crescent moon this week means smaller tidal swings than around the new or full moon, which favors patient bottom presentations over fast-moving artificials — good timing for the flounder and croaker bite already in progress, less ideal for triggering a big blitz-style event. Anglers planning a weekend trip should target the two hours around the tide change at the reef sites, and check back as the moon builds toward the next new phase for a possible uptick in current-driven feeding.

Context

Delaware Bay's early-September pattern this year reads close to typical for the region — flounder holding strong into fall, weakfish and bluefish riding a heavy bait push, and striped bass just beginning their back-bay staging ahead of the real autumn run. Eric Burnley's note that fishing "remained good for everything from croaker to tilefish" despite a rainy start to the month suggests the season is tracking on-schedule rather than running early or late.

The rare four-foot barracuda Kevin Davidson landed while fishing for mahi off the buoy line — described as the first ever reported in Delaware waters — is a genuine outlier rather than a sign of a broader warm-water shift, but it fits a wider Northeast pattern this season of unusual southern species turning up well outside their normal range.

On the regulatory side, Delaware Surf Fishing has covered ongoing changes to DNREC's recreational striped bass management and to public-pier access at Cape Henlopen; specific slot limits and closures change year to year, so anglers should confirm current striped bass regulations and pier-access rules directly with DNREC before keeping a fish or planning a pier trip.

There isn't a direct year-over-year comparison available in this feed set — no prior-season Delaware Bay reports to benchmark against here — so treat the "on schedule" read above as a seasonal generalization from the current intel rather than a confirmed trend.