Yup - I forgot to mention - slicks at dawn make for easy bluefish finding. However I found this weekend that I could only get a fish or 2 out of each slick before they wised up where last weekend I could sit off the slicks at Dead neck until I wore myself out on blue after blue.
Interesting comment on the ranger; I lost my last orange one a week back, have done OK on the orange and white variation, but the plain white one was useless as was a blue atom popper.
I also use a self painted red/white pencil popper which works whereas a lovely blue white gibbs popper doesn't.
Flies seemed to work best if they have yellow or red; I know the blue fly poppers I so lovingly painted this winter didn't raise a fish while the bright yellow and bright red ones caused strike after strike.
West of Horseshoe in 20'? The place we were trolling up blue after blue was west of Succonesset (downtide) also in 20'. I was trolling with big 4 oz. squid jigs w/ Mario squid strips which is probably pretty close to a parachute in action. Of course I was using mono, not wire so was only 5-10' down.
BTW - your right about the impact of a fish when trolling. Wow, thats a strike!