![]() ![]() Since then I’ve also caught one at Romer Light, and several mostly small ones at Shrewsbury Rocks, including a 44-inch, 9 pounder while fishing bunker there for stripers in 2006. I thought they were strictly an offshore species until Tony Arcabascio caught one in Raritan Bay while striper fishing. The silver eel here is most abundant after storms as the swell drives them out of their habitat inside wrecks. The conger of the eastern Atlantic seems to grow much larger (to almost 150 pounds) than those on the western side and are a major sport fish in Europe. NOAA Fisheries may be getting their data from trawl surveys, which aren’t efficient in sampling fish that live in heavy cover, and might get an entirely different picture of the ocean pout stock if they surveyed grounds where they really live. ![]() Instead, we used small Gulp! swimming mullet to add our two-flounder limits, but not before releasing a lot of very hungry pout from about 3 to 6 pounds. Dos Santos told the party not to use clams after that move in order to hopefully avoid pout. When I fished one day last spring on the Jersey based Barb Gail, we quickly limited on sea bass at a wreck before switching to winter flounder on rocky bottom. Despite years of no retention, the 2017 Assessment had them down to 5 percent. It turns out that a recovery plan was put into effect in 2014, but the 2015 Assessment showed them to be at just 6 percent of the target biomass. There’s certainly no scarcity of pout on wrecks and rough bottoms offshore, but hadn’t been able to find an official reason for that until Jen Goebel of NOAA Fisheries did some research. Yet, what is seemingly the ultimate trash fish has been a protected species since 2009. There were a few people who kept the pout and considered them to be tasty - and they could count on getting plenty of donations to their fish bags from most of the other customers on the boat. It was decades later before I realized that the true conger was the fish we’d been calling silver eel. When I first started party boat fishing out of Freeport, Long Island, that ugly fish was called conger eel. Though it’s said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I doubt if there’s anyone with anything good to say about the ocean pout. They are generally only a pound or two, but can grow to 7 pounds or more - and are edible. Sea ravens don’t put up much of a fight, but often feel bigger than they are by filling up with water or air just as a blowfish does. Though a fairly common catch on party boats, I’ve never seen any quantity of them come aboard - just one or two. I’ve also caught sea ravens while drifting for cod on rough bottoms off Block Island, and they are additionally found in similar areas well to the north in the Gulf of Maine. The sea raven looks even more dangerous to handle with its large colorful fins, but in fact everything is soft! It can be handled without fear, but does have small teeth. The local name is very descriptive of those sculpins with sharp projections on their gill covers which make them difficult to remove from a hook without getting cut. The sea raven is a member of the sculpin family, but quite different from the drab and skinny longhorn sculpins (commonly called hackelheads) that are also caught from those wrecks. Yet, no one has ever identified it at any of those clubs. It’s of a fairly common fish caught on wrecks not far offshore. The inspiration for this article came from a slide I’ve shown many times during presentations at fishing clubs. Many fall into the general category of “trash fish,” but most are actually good-eating. Northern waters don’t offer the great variety of species found in Florida and other warm water areas, but there’s a lot more available to us than most anglers realize. Northern Stargazer – Photo by Canvasman21 at Wikipedia ![]()
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