Inshore: Build-A-Bite - The Fisherman

Inshore: Build-A-Bite

crab
This cut piece of green crab on a jig will disperse scent in the water quickly.

Building a blackfish bite is important to maximizing potential of the fishing you could experience.

Fishing for tautog can be an interesting game. I can’t even count how many times I’ve anchored up on a piece of fishy structure just to get a few nibbles or not even a bite for the first 15 to 30 minutes of being there. In my experience, togging from shore and boat, the best fishing doesn’t usually occur until baits have been in the water for a while and other anglers have supported this. Once you get some crabs broken up down there and some scent in the water, things start to happen.

Tog are curious, yet cautious, critters and it can take a little time to get them to come out from their hiding spots to investigate a bait. Those small nibbles you sometimes feel may not even be small fish, they may come from keeper-sized fish doing some investigating. The key is to stick with it for at least a half hour, until you can unlock the true potential of the spot and coax out any tog that may be sitting below your boat.

The easiest way you can keep the scent trail flowing and build a potential bite, is by consistently swapping out “washed out” baits. Green crab pieces have a good amount of guts and juices in them and this is a main key to getting the scent dispersed. The natural flow of the current will spread all of this chum in the area, drawing in tog. Also, keep in mind that any smaller fish picking away at the baits you deploy will disperse some of the guts as well. Prep also comes into play here. Have a dozen or so baits lined up and prepped so that when you do reel up to re-bait, you can send down another fresh one in seconds. This will keep the scent trail strong and heavy.

Some tog fishermen prefer to keep the legs on their baits and some like to take them off. I’ve fished tog with both variations but if you are one of those toggers that removes the legs, save these pieces to sprinkle in the water to gather additional interest from the fish in the area. When doing this I’ll prep my baits and gather the legs and claws in a pile. As I’m set up on a spot, I’ll sprinkle some of these pieces in the water gradually during the fishing. Note that this specific chumming tactic tends to work only in shallower spots (20 feet or less) with minimal current. Any sort of heavy current will float the pieces too far downtide, rendering them useless.

For those of you that want to get even more creative, you can bring a chum pot along on your tog trips. Chum logs intended for tog are typically not available at local tackle shops so you’ll have to get a little creative with this one. You can either crush up some green crabs and freeze them in a cylinder shape to fit in a quart-sized chum pot or you can just crush up some on the boat and throw the extra legs and craws in it and drop the pot down to the bottom. The frozen version will last a bit longer than the non-frozen.

If you find yourself using whole crabs, another tip I can offer is to just crack the shell a little bit as opposed to cutting them in half. Just a tap on the top of the shell with a sinker or a small mallet will do the trick. This method allows the juices to flow at a slower rate if you find that the tide is washing out the guts and juices of a cut crab too quickly.

Building a blackfish bite is important for maximizing potential of any togging hotspot. Try some of these tips and tactics, and most importantly, stick to it for at least a half hour, not all rocky spots hold blackfish, but giving each spot 30 minutes to produce will but you in the best positon to find the true potential of any spot you choose.

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