In September, the striped bass fall run is a New England story. The southbound migration that anglers talk about as one coast-wide event — Maine to New Jersey, all fall — moves down the beach in a slow relay, and in September the baton is still in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Long Island’s turn comes in mid-to-late October. New Jersey’s best surf fishing peaks in November. If you want your first shot at bass feeding within a fly cast of dry sand, and you want it now, you go north — and you time it to the water temperature.

The fall run is genuinely the most reachable big saltwater event on the East Coast, and a first-timer who shows up in the right place at the right time can have the best fishing of their life on foot. Show up in the wrong place — southern New Jersey in mid-September, expecting blitzes — and you’ll wonder what everyone was talking about. The run rewards anglers who understand that it’s a wave of fish passing through, and that any given beach gets a transient window as the wave arrives.