Gambler Deep Sea Fishing
John Dorne caught the largest seabass I saw on the Mayhem charter Sunday, May 17, 2026.
The Gambler
Deep sea fishing is a dream seemingly every boy wants and grown men mediate over, finding realization upon setting the hook. The Gambler offers it, situated at 59 Inlet Drive in Point Pleasant, the Manasquan Inlet almost immediately accessed after leaving the dock.
Just a few buildings down the street, the Shrimp Box restaurant exists where my son and I ate in 2008, while on an overnight surf striper trip. We stayed in a nearby motel. This was just a year or two before Chris Lido began work as the Managing Editor of The Fisherman magazine, which I had been writing for since January 2006. Now Chris is second in command on the Gambler!
I’ll never forget studying Bogan’s Basin while looking out a window of the Shrimp Box. And I write “Bogan’s Basin” from memory … believe I got the phrase right.
The Gambler “was built with extra heavy construction in 2005 by Maine craftsmen and easily handles even heavy seas,” according to The Fisherman magazine’s Gambler Fishing Archives. The boat is 90 feet long and is fit for the canyon trips it does 90 miles out to sea for tuna (in October), and the 80 to 100 miles it manages for tilefish trips.
The Gambler fishes for just about everything, so I’ll do a list: blackfish, tilefish, striped bass, black seabass, fluke, ling, cod, mackerel, flounder, mahi mahi, bonito, little tunny, other pelagics, tuna, swordfish. That doesn’t include bycatch.
It’s a smorgasbord! I know I risk saying it at the cost of repeating myself—if you’ve read certain articles I’ve had published in the past, you know I used the word. Do I overuse it? Well, given all the variety the Gambler pursues, I think the shout-out is fitting.
It’s the way the light has fallen on the stern, which motivated me to take my first photograph, but all the way out there, we had been propelled from that stern by what at least one online source says is 3000 horsepower. For a story about an outing, I think this was a good first shot of morning fishing getting underway.
I Got the News
I can’t remember if I got it from a couple of sources or got it from one source and informed a couple of people going on the charter that fishing for seabass had been slow. I believe that was the Opening Day trip on May 15th that came up short.
As Gen Wong put it, “We’re about two weeks behind.” The water’s cold. Maybe it’s warming now with inland temps in the 90’s, but I have to say, out there on the water, with those cold temperatures under the boat, it was chilly.
We got about what I expected. Very few seabass caught. Some ling. Some ocean pouts. A few cod.
That’s not to say the fishing can’t be fantastic. I saw Joe Santiago’s video from last year, and seabass came over the rail constantly. Someone told me everyone on board limited out. Twelve-and-a-half inches is legal size, but sometimes four-pounders get caught. Even five-pounders do.
The fishing for stripers in Raritan Bay the Gambler does can be fast action, so can fluke. You should check out these photos I link to.
Besides the fish themselves, I’m informed that one of the mates does amazing art work that renders a fish on whatever medium it is, appearing like a fossil. I saw a big rendition of a black seabass in the galley area that gave me pause, but I had something else in mind and didn’t ask anyone about it. My source tells me this mate will do such art work for individual fishermen onboard.
A line of Mayhem. The Gambler chartered May 17, 2026: by the NJ Multispecies Mayhem Fishing Club. Pretty much a full house. Rails on both sides of the boat were full.
Joe Santiago with a nice-sized ling, also known as a red hake. Joe is the leader of Mayhem, a man with a vision. I’m astonished at how well it’s turning out. He asked me about video concepts maybe three years ago, and I really didn’t have much to tell him. I had kind of hoped to do well on You Tube myself, but I quickly realized time and effort are finite. I’m a writer, not a videographer.
I believe the NJ Multispecies Mayhem Fishing Club, which chartered the boat on Sunday, is primarily a community. Not only do all the various contests serve to bind people together, there’s plenty of allowance for those of us who don’t enter to be included among everyone else.
Who doesn’t like a little competition? I believe some people deny it in themselves, but if they faced up to it, they’d realize it’s a perfectly fitting behavior in society.
Me for example. When I go to my local river and see others fishing “my” spot, do I get pissed? No, if there’s any room at all, I see an opportunity to do some comparison. I hate to get shown up when catching stockers, but if it never happened—and it does—where would the humor be?
An ocean pout for Mark Modoski. Commonly called a congo eel.
I caught up with people I know I hadn’t seen in a while. Scott Carrol since December. I asked him about his fishing the spot he had told me about on the Musconectong River. And I don’t believe I saw Eddie Payne at that Holiday Party, not since Budd Lake ice fishing 12 or 13 years ago or more. I’m really not sure I had begun my blog Litton’s Fishing Lines yet. But I remembered our conversation about his fishing along the rocks and we picked up on it again.
I spoke to Cronk, Wong, Dorne, and some others I’d never met before. Lido was everywhere, and somebody told me he had learned the names of everyone on board! There was a moment when I worked at untangling my line. Lido appeared and asked if he could help. I let him at it. I watched and felt it was a special moment when my former editor untangled my line.
I often think of sentences as tangled lines. After all, I named my blog Litton’s Fishing Lines after the thought of written lines that work well. But rather than sentences getting untangled, ideas do. To fix a tangled sentence, you erase and then replace perhaps most or all of it. But in the abstract, you’re untangling an idea and setting it right by creating a new sentence.
Speaking of which—my rigs broke off on fish twice. After the second, I got all my hand-tied hi-lo rigs out of my tackle tote and tested them by firm pulls. They all broke. So—and that was my first time tying the like, mind you—I took a stab at doing it a little differently. Rig completed, I pulled and the 40-pound-test leader material did not break.
I remember reports of Mark Modoski catching a big Lake Hopatcong musky from one of Laurie Murphy’s rental boats. That was 2011, I’m almost certain. It set him on a course to becoming a musky expert. A lot happens in 15 years.
I had never met him, and I haven’t encountered his articles in recent years, but suddenly he was sitting right in front of me on the Gambler.
We fished side by side part of the time. And then when he was a couple guys over from my left shoulder, I overheard something said about Field & Stream.
“Did you keep writing for them after they went digital?” I asked.
“I used to get paid $3000.00 for a feature,” he said. “They started paying $500.00 an article when they went digital. I quit.”
I admire a guy who draws the line. The digital world can shove it. I would seem a hypocrite to say so, but there is a line to be drawn. If not, AI would replace us.
The galley of the Gambler. You can see in the upper-middle of the photo, a little to the right, one of the art works I had mentioned.
Before I could stand up after tying a viable hi-lo rig, let alone get to the rail, the word was out that the fishing was over. I was that close to getting a third crack at a fish, rather than striking out.