Northern kingfish fishing tips
I found a good article on kingfish on another site. Very well-written.
Anyone else have kingfish tips?
Author: Vic Attardo
Paper: The Mercury, Pottstown PA
Date: Sunday, August 3rd, 2008
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My idea of rolling the dice is to throw a baited line in the water and see what bites. Gambling is not in my nature, fishing is.
But in the shadow of Atlantic City, with its heaps of sleaze and casino cheese, anglers like Andy Smith are winning on nearly every roll, and you just may want to get in the game.
As I spoke with him, Smith was scoring on some modest size fish while working the Brigantine surf, the barrier island above the betting town. If you looked in his cooler. you'd see he'd hit the jackpot with kingfish, a soft fighting but great tasting member of the Sciaeniode or Drum family. And Smith was not alone. Though the ocean waters of mid-Jersey have been chilling bathers' toes, this summer, anglers have been reaping the rewards with the not-so-mighty but plenty-of-fun kingfish.
“I’ve caught as many as ten to fifteen in an hour," Smith of West Chester, told me as we stood within the northern shadow of Atlantic City. “There have been days when I caught them, or at least had a bite on every cast. As bad as kingfishing was last year, that’s how good it is this year.”
Despite beings king in some domains, this species doesn’t rule the surf like stripers or bluefish. Catchable kingfish start measuring at 7 inches but a good one is 12 or 13 inches and very good kingfish is 14 or 15 inches.
Basically kingfish are bottom feeders. When out for a meal they scour the bottom for various shrimps, small crabs, and other crustaceans as well as small mollusks, sea worms and young fish.
And unlike stripers and bluefish, it doesn’t take a monumental rod to catch kingfish. Smith was using a light action pole about six and a half feet long with a small spinning reel.
His bait of choice was the bloodworm. A kind "bristle worm" commonly found in sandy or silted intertidal areas – those exposed by changing tides. Tackle shops along the Jersey coast obtain bloodworms from dealers in Maine where there is a substantial bloodworm-gathering industry.
But tackle shop bloodworms are not cheap. The going rate at the shore this summer is $14 a dozen. Fortunately, you don’t need a whole bloodworm to entice a kingfish. To attract this species, all that’s required is a one-half to three-quarter inch length of worm threaded on the hook. Because bloodworms are about six inches in length, that means an angler can get a lot of kingfish out of $14.
For his terminal tackle, Smith was tossing a simple “kingfish” rig which is basically an over and under bottom rig – two small hooks separated by about a foot of line. Each hook is accompanied by a colorful float on a short leader. The purpose of the floats is to hold the hook away from the line and also give some spice to the rig. As we talked the Brigantine surf was nearly copasetic so Smith used only a two-ounce weight; others on the beach were using twos or threes.
Actually it was the relatively calm of the waves that the angler felt was helping his catch rate.
“Kingfish don’t like high surf. It’s better when the water is calm,” he noted.
The consistent south wind that much of the Jersey coast has experienced this summer has created what oceanographers call an “upwelling.” Basically the wind brings the cooler water up from the deep ocean and sends it toward the surface and the inshore waters. Along the Brigantine beach, the water temperature during the last week of July was just 62 F.
As Smith was tossing his bait into the Atlantic, He’d heave it as far as it would go, about 40 yards. After the sinker contacted the bottom, it would slowly drift across the bottom so Smith would keep a tight line, in effect, constantly moving the bait in short increments. When the waves became so calm that the light weight held fast to the sand, he would slowly reel in line to cover distance. As the rig neared the beach, he got his hits.
“They seem to be in the first drop behind the first wave,” he said. “They are not way out there.”
Part of Smith’s fishing system was the use of braided line on his small spinning reel. He had spooled with 14-pound test Fireline.
“I can feel everything with it,” he noted, adding that the light bites of the kingfish were easy to detect and the corrugated ridges in the sand as he retrieved the bait were readily felt.
The only other consideration that Smith made that seemed to improve his catch rate over others on BrigantineBeach was the constant replacement of drying bloodworms. Bloodworms get their name from an obvious characteristic; when you cut one, a thin red liquid spills out. Certainly the presence of fresh bloodworm blood helps make them attractive to kingfish. However, after a time bloodworms seem to loose their guts.
“They get washed out if you leave them on too long,” Smith said. “It pays to put on a fresh one.”
Indeed, pays in more ways than one. Many anglers are working the Jersey surf for kingfish not because this species puts up a strong fight but because kingfish tastes so good.
Smith said they fillet easily and taste great on the grill. Recently local anglers supplied kingfish for a large community fish fry on Brigantine and no one had to be coaxed into taking seconds.
“Even people who don’t like the taste of fish like kingfish,” Smith said. “They’re very mild.”
Perhaps then it’s their taste that has given kingfish their name. It seems they are kings of the grill.
As I said, I’m not a gambling man, but I’d bet on that.
http://www.pottsmerc.com/
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Originally Posted by seamonkey
