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| Ocean City bay & inlet fishing hotspots |
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| Rudow's Guide to Fishing the Mid Atlantic shows hundreds of hotspots for coastal anglers from New York to North Carolina. Charts like this one detail inlets, coastal bays, and offshore areas. Each marked hotspot corrosponds with the text in the book. Other sections of the book describe specific sportfish and how to target them, plus tackle and tactics saltwater anglers need to know to become more effective fishermen. Here's a sample of the bay/inlet description:
MDB1 marks an area generally known as the Thoroughfare and the Thoroughfare channel. Despite what the chart shows, there’s deep water right up to many of the bulkheads on the western edge; in actuality the channels and shoals in this area of the bay change and shift from season to season. The Thoroughfare is a good place to catch summer flounder; most people fish here with the standard Fluke Killer baited with a minnow/squid combination, but bouncing jigs also works well. Small sea bass and assorted ocean panfish will also make their presence known in this section of deep water. Getting to the deep water at MDB2 is a little trickier than the chart would have you believe; the channel running along shore here is unmarked, and shoaling several years ago shifted the channel so it takes a big dog-leg to the left runs up towards the Thoroughfare; people inexperienced with the area should follow the marked channel until passing Mallard Island. Where a second channel splits off to the right (just off the boundaries of the chart showing these hotspots) you can follow it 100’ before back-tracking, to enter the deep water at MDB2. This slice of water is not fished by many people, and supports good flounder fishing, particularly on an outgoing tide. On incoming and high tides, it’s often swamped with so many juvenile sea bass and croaker, it’s impossible to keep a bait out for flounder. (Note: The bar between the two deep areas here is great for digging clams!)
MDB3 marks the western channel running under the Rt. 50 bridge. This channel is unmarked on the north side of the bridge, but it is a good area to catch flounder during the daylight hours and stripers and weakfish at night. The current rips through here, and between the bridge pilings and shoals there’s a ton of structure. (If you go under the bridge be sure to watch out for fishing lines hanging down from above, as lots of people fish from the catwalk here.) For the flounder follow the usual game-plan, and for the stripers and weakfish set up along the edges of the light line, and cast out live peanut bunker or spot. The main channel going under the bridge, at MDB4, is another area that’s popular with flounder anglers. It would be suicidal, however, to drift right through the middle of the channel. Traffic here is often intense, and the current roars under the bridge. Still, you’ll see people try it. Wiser anglers will move well away from the bridge and drift the channel edges. Many anglers will also drift through the channel farther above the bridge, at MDB5, with some success. This spot is better to mark, however, for late fall angling. It’s one of the few areas up inside the bay where you can catch tautog large enough to keep. You’ll get them on green crabs and sand fleas fished on bottom and along the bulkhead here, sometimes extremely early in the spring (usually late March or early April) and commonly late in the fall (October or November.) Sea bass and croaker also frequent this area, with most of the bass being too small to keep and croaker catches varying wildly from season to season.
There's a whole lot more info plus custom-marked charts and GPS coordinates for hotspots up & down the coast, in Rudow's Guide to Fishing the Mid Atlantic!
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