The Cod Kick-Off
It’s tough to say what this winter’s fishery has in store, but there’s only one way to find out…
As I type this frenzied little bulletin, the sand on my half of the hour glass is draining at an alarming rate, Christmas is bearing down like a big squall chewing up the distance between me and the westward horizon, and somehow none of it is weighing me down: I know I’m far from alone. Partly, it’s easier this time of year because the times when I have to pull lunatic hours at the keyboard, I have none of the usual dread that somewhere at the very second it occurs to me, someone is into a furious hit of fish—that they’re doing it without me. Not this month, not this year: It’s been some time since we had it this bad in a collective way almost from the outset of Month Twelve. The wind, the sleet, snow and the bitterest kind of cold seem to have ushered in an unusually powerful sense that it would be utterly futile to so much as think about finding a reasonable gap between fronts. Fleet-wide—and I’ve talked to enough guys to say this with some certainty—there’s an unusual resignation that as much as we should probably be trying to get the ball rolling on winter codfish, there just wouldn’t be much point in getting pissed off about the immediate upwelling of good reasons we just can’t pull it off.
I think the years that the tautog fishing craps out as early and over such a wide expanse of normally productive late-innings bottom as it did in November, it takes us longer to get moving on cod. Naturally, a few private-boat guys who have the kind of logbooks needed to scratch out good catches of codfish in December have done just that, steaming south of the Island then working east, or heading down a bit farther to sample a couple of the lesser known wrecks. The folks who always catch December codfish have put some solid days together, but even these sharpies have been quick to condition their good reports by admitting they have no real, clear notion of what’s going on in the bigger picture of groundfish and baitfish movements within our general area. At least one gillnetter with the right permits has found nice shots of big-for-us cod, 12 to 25-pound stuff in numbers to fill multiple totes.
From the sound of it, there’s some quality life on the east side of Coxes Ledge and east of there—in addition to the usual scattered fits and starts of “local” fish heaped up on little nuggets of prime ground anywhere from south of Southwest Ledge all the way east, and on some of the deeper wrecks. What we haven’t seen yet is a stretch of several days with enough boats out in recon mode over enough square miles to see a real pattern. I get the feeling it might be the first week of January before folks feel liberated to actually hang the dock lines and get this show on the road.
While there are a few intrepid private anglers who regularly work on Island cod in small boats, the overwhelming majority of January cod catching happens on the decks of several local party boats obviously, given January’s famously violent and changeable weather patterns, an 80 to 100-foot
boat affords comfort and peace of mind. Since precious few readers will likely be running their own vessels, the following advice will deal with fishing on the big boats.
Barring a few seasons between 2008 and 2011, when huge schools of cod arrived and fueled fast action right through almost to April, Block Island’s winter cod fishery tends to wax and wane with the big bait movements that have typically wound down in early February. While the longer range prospects remain unclear, it’s probably safe to assume that some of the best fishing of the season will unfold between New Year’s and mid-February — a block of time that typically witnesses a major pile-up of sea herring, mackerel, and sand eels, with numbers of codfish shadowing bait schools in open-bottom areas. The preferred mode, when conditions allow it, is drift fishing, rather than sitting on the anchor on a specific piece of bottom.
To maximize your odds of a successful outing, consider the ways you can eliminate the likely duds in terms of fishing conditions. As a general rule, you’ll be wise to pass on any day with sustained winds of 20 or more, and you can also avoid days with easterly winds (the conventional wisdom says that east winds not only tend to slow the fishing, but have a way of dirtying up the water and stirring up huge, ravenous swarms of dreaded spiny dogfish). Considering that drifting tends to yield best trips, try to choose a day with light winds, and mind where your day falls relative to the moons, since moon tides often force skippers to anchor up (and if moon tide and a strengthening breeze clash, get ready for a day out on the floating washing machine). Choose a day with light or no wind, ideally one following a day or two of relatively settled weather, when water should be clean and fish should cooperate.
Contrary to all you Grandpa’s old cod gear—the 9-foot stick with the general sensitivity of a coal shovel, the 20-pound 4/0 reel with the 1:1 gear ratio, loaded with 80-pound mono, and the bucket of 22-ounce Norwegian jigs—state-of-the- art cod weaponry looks more like a fluke rod than an old Gloucester telephone pole. Modern cod sharpies have learned that very light braided line lets them sling very small diamond jigs, Vik-E’s, and other smaller metals that match the small herring, sand eels or spike mackerel, the island’s January cod prefer for their post- holiday binge-feeding. A 7-foot medium to fast-action stick paired off to a light- weight winch like the Daiwa Saltist will handle a wide range of required lead or chrome to keep your bait or jig on or near the ground floor.
Since headboat fishing tends to involve crowds and thus occasional tangles, safest bet is to avoid running braid all the way to the swivel on your leader. Instead, try tying in a 25 to 30-foot topshot of 40-pound mono to allow some shock absorption to prevent pulled hooks. The topshot’s more important role, since most tangles happen close to terminal tackle, is to facilitate untangling efforts by preventing braid-braid or dreaded braid-to-mono snarls. When air temps are a balmy 5 degrees, trust me when I say you’d rather tie knots, untangle mono than braid.
While you won’t know the day’s go-to method until you reach the grounds, you’ll be wise to carry a load of back-up bait rigs, as well as an array of jigs and sinkers from six to 16 ounces—using the lightest chunk of metal with which you can successfully tend bottom. By all means shorten your own R&D time at the rail by watching what your neighbors are using with best results.
When, given the day’s unique combination of wind, tide, bait, and codfish, you discover the magic combo, stick with it. Bear in mind that many days in a given winter, the bite will go like gangbusters for an hour or two—frequently in the early morning—then crap out all at once as though someone hit a light switch. As usual with a bite like this, the difference between the highliner and the chump whose money runs up the big-fish pool is the extent to which the highliner uses every available moment fish arte chewing to fish with utmost focus, swinging market cod over the rail hand over fist while his neighbor stares into the morning air, hooks on the bottom bare since a bite he missed five minutes ago, cooler still empty.
While it remains to be seen what the coming weeks and months will bring us in the way of Block Island cod, I argue that the best way to be sure you’re on the water for the best of this year’s bite is to get after it early and often, out making the reports while your buddies are grousing about the chill in the air and the lack of fillets in the fridge.
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