I am in the middle of a couple days at the ocean with my family. We are staying at Seabrook, and I went down to the beach here for some surf perch fishing. I do this whenever I come out here. It is pretty easy. My standard setup is a drop shot setup with two hooks about 1 and 2' above the sinker. I use razor clam meat, and find that this works best. This time I went with the clam meat, but also used some cured sand shrimp. Hat bites on the clams, but they never hit the sand shrimp. note taken...
I fished an outgoing tide, they say to go with an incoming tide, but I don't know that it matters that much. This time of year the surf is pretty rough, so the sand is pretty tore up, and the water clarity is very brown. I had a few takes on the clam necks, but they were stealing the bait off the hook.
It is very hard to keep clam necks on the hook in the rough surf. You only get about one cast per chunk of clam. Your rig is out there so far, that if they hit it a couple times and you don't set the hook, you lose your bait. I caught one good size surf perch, about 15-16" and a couple pounds.
they hit hard, and you have a heck of a lot of line out there in rough surf, so you hope that you can translate a hard jerk of the rod into a hook set. This time, it was fish on and to the bag.
I found myself hooking up with some dungenous crab this time also. I would drag them all the way in, and then just as I would reach down to grab it, they let go. (next time need to check those crab regs. on the coast, wasn't expecting to run into them)
So,slow day of fishing. 1 fish to the bag, and a half dozen take downs with lost fish. Tomorrow morning the family goes razor clam digging, good times!

---