The tunas and marlin might be long gone by the time snow starts falling, but there are still predators lurking at the Mid-Atlantic canyons.
You’re in serious need of a cure for cabin fever, and there’s a weather-window opening up? While most pelagics have left the Mid-Atlantic canyon waters for the winter, you do still have an offshore option. Many deepwater groundfish don’t migrate away, and they’ll be more than willing to eat as they lurk down deep. Golden tilefish and rose fish will make up the bulk of the catch, but in some areas you can also find wreckfish, barrelfish, bluelines, and more—if, that is, you can stay away from the dogfish.
The Where in Winter
During the winter months you’ll find golden tilefish prowling in the exact same areas as they dwell during the warm months of the year. Get down 600’ or 800’ and the seasonal temperatures swings aren’t an issue, so the fish don’t have to change locations. Look for plateaus along the edges of the canyons and the shelf, where the steep drops level out and become gradual for short distances. The hot zone is usually in the 600’ to 800’ range but waters down to 1000’ will prove productive. You want a muddy bottom, not rocky, because the goldens burrow into the bottom. They do so in clumped together in loose colonies, so whenever you catch one hit a mark on the GPS and try repeated drifts through the same zone.
Remember that these fish are slow growers, and it’s easy to fish out a golden hotspot over the course of a few seasons. When you find a new spot and catch 40- to 50-pounders, a couple of years later the catch mostly consists of 20- to 30-pounders, and a few years after that the spot tends to run dry. Winter trips will probably be few and far between no matter how dedicated an angler you may be simply because the acceptable weather days are so few and far between. So, make prospecting for new numbers a priority during the summer when you have more time on the ocean.
In deeper areas of this range, generally 800’ and below, you may also encounter barrelfish. Rose fish, which are small but tasty, can show up anywhere in the deep and are often mixed with goldens. Oddly enough, schools of bluefish sometimes show up in these depths during the winter months, too. If you get on rocky bottom wreckfish and snowy grouper can be in the mix. And although blueline tilefish will generally be found in significantly shallower waters, a few may pop up when you’re targeting goldens, too. However, note that the season for bluelines has been shifting in recent years to reduce the overall take, and as of now, is closed during the winter months. Of course, these seasons are always prone to changes so check the latest for northern and Mid-Atlantic areas at the NOAA New England/Mid-Atlantic recreational regulations page. If you’re south of the VA/NC boarder see the South Atlantic regs.
Beware the Spiny Dogs
What throws a major-league kink into the “where” part of the winter angling equation is the spiny dogfish. While they’re few and far between in these depths in the Mid-Atlantic zone during the warmer months of the year, as the water temps drop they migrate out to the deep. And they do so in massive schools. Try dropping a bait—any bait—down to the bottom where they’re present and much of the time they’ll be so thick that you don’t have a prayer of weeding through them. It’s possible to go to a spot where you caught plentiful golden tilefish and rosefish a week earlier, discover dogfish have moved in, and catch them by the dozens without ever reeling up a single quality fish (been there, done that!)
Determining ahead of time where the dogfish are likely to be is critical. They prefer water temps in the upper 40s and low 50s, so take a peek at the SatFish SST Charts before you leave the dock. When you see spiny-friendly waters sitting right along the shelf and in the canyons, expect you may need to try multiple locations before finding one that isn’t covered up. In some areas you might find it necessary to push out beyond the 800’ mark in order to get away from them. At this point, look for rises in the bottom that come up by 100’ to 200’ and are surrounded by at least 900’ to 1,000’. Most of the time these will be doggie-free.
Gear in the Chill
Other than bundling up in a big way, the gear and tactics remain the same as for summer deep-dropping with one exception: since you may have to go deeper than usual to avoid the spiny dogs, you may need more line capacity and heavier weights. Just how critical this becomes depends in part on your specific gear, and in part on how fast the drift is on any given day. Just remember that if your gear is stretched to the limit when fishing in 800’ during the summer months, it probably won’t cut it for wintertime deep drops.
On many winter offshore trips the need to go deeper than usual also makes the use of jigs very difficult. Golden tilefish in particular love those big jigs (sweetened with squid or fish chunks, of course), and they’ll often out-catch regular bait on hooks. But it’s very tough to find jigs above 850 or so grams (about two pounds) and except for the very nicest glassy-calm days this just isn’t enough weight to hold bottom if you’ve been forced to push out past 850’ or 900’. Unless the weather is picture-perfect sending down a meat-curtain grouper-style deep-drop rig with 10/0 to 12/0 circle hooks weighted with five to seven pounds of lead is often necessary.
Bait can consist of squid or cut fish, and while everything swimming around down there does love to eat squid, missed bites and lost baits become a big waste of time when you have to hold the button (or worse yet, crank) for 15 minutes just to check your hooks. There’s nothing wrong with threading some tempting squid chunks onto two or three hooks on a six-hook rig, but also sending down some tough belly strips cut from mahi or false albacore is always a smart idea.
Okay: ready to get a break from that cabin fever? Watch the weather, check out those Satfish SST charts, and bundle up. It may be chilly out there on the open Atlantic, but there are still some fish to be caught at the canyons.
