Green Crabs and Green Jigs

Tautog may sport a white chin, but like a gun-slinger from the Wild Wild West they are one bad hombre dressed in black. I look at them as Neptune’s late-season gift that keeps on giving, well into late fall. As other options dwindle, it’s as if the god of the sea taps us on the shoulder and says, “Hold on there, I’ve got one more for you!”

What’s not to love about a fish that will sorely test you and your gear? It grows to impressive size, is often a challenge to hook, and is a treat at the dinner table. Come October, tautog should be on your schedule! For those north of Cape Cod who at one time would retool and focus on cod at this time of the year but have been flummoxed by the downward spiral of the stock, tautog is a timely antidote that is a probable bet in Buzzards Bay and southern New England—but may even reward those who prefer dropping anchor a bit north of the Cape.

Modern gear advances have paved the way for a relatively new way to whip those white chins, and it all comes down to the jig. If you’re a decades-long lover of tautog, I’m hoping you’ll be inclined to give this new method a try, and if you’re new to the pursuit, relax—this technique makes it easy to start catching.

Fall Fun Begins Now

The scattered tautog of summer begin to aggregate in early October in preparation for their own “run” of sorts. As water temperatures dip to the 60-degree threshold, tautog feel the need to feed. Their migration is less of a north-south movement and more of an inshore-offshore pilgrimage, until they eventually reach a ledge, rockpile or wreck between 80 and 150 feet of water to reside for the winter and through early spring. In fall, the tog will be feeding ravenously in preparation of their eventual deep-water slumber.

In September and October, look for tautog among many types of “live bottom” that hold delicacies such as crustaceans, barnacles and mollusks. In early fall, most fish stage near rockpiles, mussel beds, ledges and reefs in 20 to 30 feet of water. As water temperatures drop in late October, they will begin to shift to deeper water between 30 and 50 feet. Odds are that where you catch one, you’ll catch more, since they are tightly schooled feeding machines in fall.

If you find good structure just seaward of a harbor, marsh or estuary, then your chance of finding tautog will increase. I’ve cut my tog teeth aboard my friend Captain Jason Colby’s Little Sister on the Westport, Massachusetts side of Buzzards Bay, but every October there are a smattering of reports of a few diehards who pick away at schools of tautog off Blackmans Point in Marshfield, Minot Ledge in Scituate, Graves Light in Boston Harbor and even off Saunders Ledge in Nahant. The techniques mentioned in this story will score you tog wherever they may roam.

A good starting point for finding likely tautog lairs is to look for lobster pots, which belie structure-filled bottom. Anyone who has seen a lobster leg protruding from the maw of a tautog can attest to the craving tog have for these critters. Upwellings and navigational markers often point to tog-holding terrain as well. The ideal tautog home has peaks and valleys with deeper water nearby. Tog find food among the rocks and seek the sanctuary of nooks in structure to hide from larger predators.

Going Green

Tautog can be very spot-specific and are reluctant to move far from the security of a favorite lair. Anchoring accurately is extremely important. You can “cheat” a bit by chumming, however. Captain Jason Colby is a stickler for crunching up a few crabs, shoving them into a chum pot, weighing it down with a sash weight and luring the tog right to the boat. Most any crab will attract tautog, and not just the more bait-desirable species such as green or Asian crabs; even the malodorous, hideous-looking spider crab will make fine tog chum.

For generations, hefty gear was considered a necessity for tog fishing. Owing to the tautog’s reputation as a bare-knuckled pugilist that throws its haymakers from a line-shredding pit, it was rightly theorized that if you didn’t go stout, you were not going to go home with tog fillets. However, even tautog fishing has not been immune to the evolution of gear, with braided line and lightweight, sensitive-yet-powerful tackle relegating the cumbersome stuff of old to the dust bin. This has even paved the way for a relatively new player in the tautog game: the jig.

While jigging for tautog is nothing new, in many capacities it had been a niche technique, a skinny-water method for small fish, with no place in the wild world of the white chin. But from my perspective, that all changed one day when Mike Dumais from Northborough jumped aboard the Little Sister with Captain Colby and me. In spite of our incredulous looks, he tied on a green-and-orange jig and proceeded to not only whip white chins on his jig-and-crab combination but to outfish us significantly, with some of the fish nearing 10 pounds! And to add further insult, he wasn’t even wielding a conventional rig—he had a spinning combo for heaven sakes!

The advantages of a jig are numerous and hard to ignore. The bean-shaped design of the Tidaltails jig he was using allow it to slice through the water column, so he was able to significantly downsize his weight from the typical 3 to 4 ounces of lead to 1 ounce of jig. Unlike the multi-lined, multi-hooked and weighted bait rig, you can use the jig to prod every nook and crevice where a tog might be hiding. And contrary to what I feared most, the jig hangs up far less than a bait rig. This is because of the compact nature of the jig and the fact that the hook rides up, which usually puts it out of harm’s way. Inevitably, the jig makes the angler less dependant on sitting stagnant, waiting for a tog to come along. In fact, a crew that works together will often move along the deck, walking the jig along the bottom and poking likely tog lairs from every possible vantage point, covering every inch of a potential honey hole.

Mastering the Nibble

Understand that it is not the jig on its own that gets the tog to bite, but rather the jig is the vehicle to deliver to the tog what it most wants: the crab! In fact, while speaking to the Tidaltails Blackfish Jig’z creator, John Knight Sr. of New Rochelle, New York, he told me that the dappled color scheme of green and orange was designed to make the jig blend in among the filtered light and varied bottom where tog thrive. Divers were enlisted to observe different colors, and they felt the palette picked for the Tidaltails Jig’z most effectively disappeared underwater. The versatility of the jig also delivers some unexpected benefits. During a slow bite one day, figuring I had nothing to lose, I lobbed the jig and crab into the distance. About 5 feet into the retrieve, a tautog grabbed the jig! Try that with a gangly swivel, hook, leader, and sinker.

Tog will crunch up all manner of crabs including rock crabs, green crabs, hermit crabs and Asian crabs. When the crabs are the size of a silver dollar or smaller, I use them whole, while larger ones get halved or quartered. For ease of hook entry into the crab, break a leg off the crab and push the point into the opening so that it protrudes out of the shell, side or belly of the crab. If you are using a whole crab, make sure you crack the top of the shell with a sinker or other hard object to unleash the come-hither juices to nearby tautog. Hold that crab in the palm of your hand as you crack it and do not crunch the crab against the boat. A noisy boat is not music to a tog’s ears!

One of the allures of angling for tautog is mastering the nibble. While there are times when a tog just inhales the bait and you are instantly on, that is the exception rather than the rule. Usually they will chomp the crab into pieces and, if your reflexes are off, your swings will result in far more misses than hits. Do not flinch from the first thump unless you are obviously on. It is the second thump that is the pass-or-fail test. After the first bite, raise the rod tip slightly, and as soon as you feel the second take, raise your rod firmly and set the hook.
I don’t believe in the “crossing the eyes” approach because if you miss that fish, you can almost guarantee that your bait will be gone. And by the time you re-bait, your deckmate may be battling “your” blackfish! Instead, wait until you feel the weight of that fish and then give a quick hook-set. Another trick I’ve found is that when the inevitable happens and you pull up the entrails of a crab that was pummeled by a tautog, dose the remains quickly with a drop or two of BioEdge Crab potion and then let it back down; I’ve caught a lot of tog this way on the smallest of scraps.

There are no magic bullets in fishing, and the jig is not the ultimate answer for all things tautog. It has its limitations: depths of 45 feet or more naturally require a heavier jig to tend bottom and the requisite bulk needed to achieve a weight of 4 or more ounces makes the jig cumbersome. At that depth, I’ll keep a conventional two-dropper-loop bait rig with 5/0 octopus hooks at the ready. But that is a conundrum for much later in the fall. For most of October, the tog will be shallow, bunched up on rockpiles and hungry for green crabs and green jigs!