Bring Me A Cod.
Why You'll Want To Invite This Unknown To Dinner.
Originally Published in Fish Alaska magazine, January 2012
By Terry W. Sheely
I’m headed out the door with a bundle of salmon and halibut rods, boxes of jigs, curly tail plastics, assorted
hoochies and flashers, mooching hooks, scented jellies, squirt-bottle attractants and flame-red crescent sinkers, looking forward to five days of premium fishing action in prime Southeast waters and she says, “be sure to bring back some cod.”
Cod? I’m going for halibut and kings.
Uh huh, she says, but try to bring back something to eat, you know—true cod, fish for dinner.
As far as my wife Natalie is concerned if I return from a week of fishing without a single red salmon fillet in the cooler it’s an, “oh well, c'est la vie, such is life” event.
Come home without a few bags of snowy-white cod fillets and it’s a disaster, an inexcusable shortcoming, a soap-box of table fare tragedy. Over-stated? If you think so you haven’t tasted her parmesan cheese-encrusted, brown-sugar glazed cod bake served with a drizzle of maple syrup.
Slabs of fresh halibut and juicy red salmon fillets will always rank high on my menu, but I can’t argue with my wife’s preference for the versatility and succulent flavor of the sweet white flakes of true cod meat.
Cod go by several aliases, Pacific, gray, Alaska, but by any name I’ve found that trues are genuinely underrated and unappreciated as a sport fish. And maybe they deserve it. No line-searing runs, no finicky
attitudes, and they are about as selective as a garbage disposal. Anything that fits goes down.
On the other hand, Pacific cod are aggressive, travel in huge schools, eat with abandon are plentiful throughout Southeast and Southcentral saltwater and the bite can be as fast as hitting the bottom. Sitting on top of a few thousand cod, in 100 to 200 feet of water, with a boatload of yingers and yangers, hookin’ and hootin’ as fast as they can re-bait and bang the bottom may not be techie-sport but it’s always great fishin’ fun.
There is no bag limit on sport-caught true cod in Alaska, and it can be tough to resist loading the boat during a bite frenzy. While there’s no shortage of cod or fear of a fine, responsible anglers only take what they can eat before it freezer burns, and for me that’s never more than 10 cod.
The hottest cod spots, according to ADFG surveys, are off Juneau, Ketchikan, Kodiak Island and Cook Inlet. But they also admit that true cod sport fishery is not closely monitored and most catches are boated incidentally by anglers targeting ling cod (no relation), yelloweye rockfish and halibut. Almost no one specifically targets acific cod, no one except us.
Four of us, in the last throes of a three-day salmon/halibut junket between Prince of Wales and Ketchikan are specifically targeting true cod for the winter freezer. We’re drifting over a large 20-fathom flat, watching the fish finder for blips of baitfish and feeling lucky.
The bank is rich in feed, cod and pollock smolts are in here by the ton, walls of krill, small herring molded into massive balls. In August, the bank is rich with food and attracts every feeder in the area; kings, halibut, rockfish and—Pacific cod. Several miles wide, from 150 to 220 feet deep, fairly flat with a hard bottom, the bank is ideal cod cover. There’s a mild 11-foot tide swing today and a light chop on the water. I couldn’t have scripted more ideal drifting conditions.
Pacific cod are demersal, bottom huggers, living exclusively within a few feet of the sea floor. In the winter they collect in concentrations on shelf edges and slopes 328 to 820 feet deep (they’ve been found as deep as 2,871 feet), but when the weather sweetens the massive schools start moving into shallower water. By summer the big schools are in less than 328 feet and often between 100 and 200 feet—easy range for bottom thumping with standard jigging gear.
The game plan is
1) find bait,
2) drift ‘till we hit a concentration of cod,
3) drop anchor,
4) fill the fish box.
While cod fishing doesn’t require specialized gear, (it can be done with a handline for Pete sake) the right tackle can make a difference in production and comfort.
My cod jigging weapon of choice was recommended by John Posey, head honcho at Lamiglas Rods and it’s been
a workhorse for not only heavy-duty cod fishing, but a sporty stick for lings, rockfish and eater halibut. It’s a specialized jigging stick, a Tri Flex Graphite 6 ½ foot BL 6620C rated for three ounces of weight with 20-pound test line.
In deeper water, Posey recommended stepping up to a rod that will handle 6-ounces of lead and 30-pound line, like the BL 6630C—a heavier version of my jigger.
Other rods to consider are the Seeker Hercules Series, 7-foot composites with a medium-slow action, and the Shakespeare 6-foot one-piece Ugly Stik.
The designed jigging rod has enough length to pump and derrick an open-mouthed true cod 200 feet to the surface, enough backbone for the job and a fast stout tip to drive the hooks home. Both are solid rods for jigging cod depths.
I add a sliver of herring belly to the 5/0 Siwash hook on a four-inch Point Wilson Dart herring pattern and flip it over the side in free fall. It piles into the bottom, I crank two turns on the reel handle, flip the rod tip up twice and on the third bounce the cod nails it. With the no-stretch braid line and the sensitive but stiff tip on the jigging rod, I can almost see what’s happening in the depths. The fish spirals up like a sock full of anchor weights. I’m guessing 8 pounds but not surprised when it turns into another five pounder.
On the other side of the boat, there’s a double at the rail and my friend with the wimpy 10-foot mooching rod has his handsful. Too little backbone, too big a bucketmouth. With the jigging rods, we land our fish and get back in the water, while my friend is still pumping the noodle.
I pick a jigging stick a little on the light side, simply because I love to wrestle heavy fish on light gear, but I’ve found that most anglers that I’ve fished with prefer 30-pound rated rods. Less wear and tear on back muscles, they claim.
These fat, gray, chin-whiskered, google-eyed fish don’t make line-gobbling runs, but they often come in with their bucket mouths wide open creating tremendous resistance that can be a handful on rods too light or too supple.
But because they don’t run, cod are easily matched with light-saltwater conventional casting reels. I favor a reel with a minimum 5.1 retrieve ratio that helps me get the bucketmouth topside as fast as possible. Where true cod are concerned the goal is not the fight, it’s the fillet and the quicker you get your fish to the boat, the quicker you can catch the next one.
Lightweight reels won’t wear out the arm like the traditional heavy squidding reels. All a decent cod jigging reel needs is enough line capacity to hit bottom (175 yards of 20-pound test is plenty), a large cranking handle for leverage and zip line retrieve ratios. Dozens of small but tough saltwater bait-casting reels, the type often used for salmon fishing, will qualify for cod jigging—reels like a Shimano Tourium, the venerable red Ambassadeur 7000, or Penn’s OM 2000.
Old timer, high-profile squidding reels work, but they’re heavier than necessary and by the end of a long day jigging, weight counts.
Whichever reel you pick, load it with braid. The small diameter resists kiting in a running current, holds bottom with light weight jigs and has the sensitivity to immediately telegraph pickups when bait fishing or the soft slurpy strike of a cod inhaling a jig.
With braid, I knot 6-feet of 30-pound test monofilament on for a leader and to keep the easily nicked braid away from sharp bottom obstructions. The heavy mono is also handy for swinging five-pounders into the boat.
Bait shows on the depth sounder, a carpet of green sifting across the bottom. We drop lines with 5/0 hooks and whole herring baits and two rods go down the instant they hit bottom.
George drops anchor and we swing into the school. Bait paints the bottom of the locater and where there is bait on this flat there are true cod. And true cod have a sweet spot for natural baits: herring, a slab of squid or a belly-strip of almost anything including another cod will get crunched when dropped into a school. Given a choice, though, I’ll go bait-less with a chrome-bright diamond jig or Point Wilson Dart in a bright herring finish.
Bounced in two-foot hops off the bottom these jigs are deadly on cod and there’s no bait to mess with. One of
my aha revelations of how simplistic cod fishing can be occurred three decades ago before Washington’s Puget Sound was trawled out. Stocking capped Norwegian’s in denim coats and small clinker boats would drop jigs on stout hand lines into Agate Pass, give them a few bounces and catch big true cod as fast as they could unhook and throw back. Hand-lining with a chrome or nickel finished spoon is a technique that Scandinavian fishermen polished on Atlantic cod, and when the families moved West they perfected the tactic on Pacifics. It works just as well today, but I prefer to string my spoons and Darts on a jigging rod and save the back muscles for when I need to wrestle a halibut.
My idea of the ideal cod rig is a herring-shaped chrome-finish jig with a few inches of natural bait to sweeten a 5/0 Siwash hook. Best of both worlds.
A workhorse bait rig that was shown to me by charter skipper Dewey Crockett has always been a favorite go-to rig, especially if fishing is a little tough. Crockett attached a 6-ounce round ball sinker on a 10-inch dropper to the bottom ring of a three-way swivel. A stout monofilament leader (50-pound test) with 4/0 bait hook was notted to the center ring and the mainline tied into the top ring. The heavy leader resists the tangles common with thinner leader material. We’d impale half a herring on the hook and repeatedly pound the ball weight against the bottom. “Callin’ em in,” was how Crockett described it. As I remember it, we never pounded bottom longer than 15 minutes before attracting a school.
Today, the four of us are setting jig hooks and flopping cod over the rail at a pace that would make the ol’ Norwegian hand jiggers sit up and take notice. A couple are whiskered monsters are pushing 10 pounds but most are four and 6 pounds, a typical catch.
It’s a great end to a good fish trip, I’m bringing her a cod.
By Terry W. Sheely
I’m headed out the door with a bundle of salmon and halibut rods, boxes of jigs, curly tail plastics, assorted
hoochies and flashers, mooching hooks, scented jellies, squirt-bottle attractants and flame-red crescent sinkers, looking forward to five days of premium fishing action in prime Southeast waters and she says, “be sure to bring back some cod.”
Cod? I’m going for halibut and kings.
Uh huh, she says, but try to bring back something to eat, you know—true cod, fish for dinner.
As far as my wife Natalie is concerned if I return from a week of fishing without a single red salmon fillet in the cooler it’s an, “oh well, c'est la vie, such is life” event.
Come home without a few bags of snowy-white cod fillets and it’s a disaster, an inexcusable shortcoming, a soap-box of table fare tragedy. Over-stated? If you think so you haven’t tasted her parmesan cheese-encrusted, brown-sugar glazed cod bake served with a drizzle of maple syrup.
Slabs of fresh halibut and juicy red salmon fillets will always rank high on my menu, but I can’t argue with my wife’s preference for the versatility and succulent flavor of the sweet white flakes of true cod meat.
Cod go by several aliases, Pacific, gray, Alaska, but by any name I’ve found that trues are genuinely underrated and unappreciated as a sport fish. And maybe they deserve it. No line-searing runs, no finicky
attitudes, and they are about as selective as a garbage disposal. Anything that fits goes down.
On the other hand, Pacific cod are aggressive, travel in huge schools, eat with abandon are plentiful throughout Southeast and Southcentral saltwater and the bite can be as fast as hitting the bottom. Sitting on top of a few thousand cod, in 100 to 200 feet of water, with a boatload of yingers and yangers, hookin’ and hootin’ as fast as they can re-bait and bang the bottom may not be techie-sport but it’s always great fishin’ fun.
There is no bag limit on sport-caught true cod in Alaska, and it can be tough to resist loading the boat during a bite frenzy. While there’s no shortage of cod or fear of a fine, responsible anglers only take what they can eat before it freezer burns, and for me that’s never more than 10 cod.
The hottest cod spots, according to ADFG surveys, are off Juneau, Ketchikan, Kodiak Island and Cook Inlet. But they also admit that true cod sport fishery is not closely monitored and most catches are boated incidentally by anglers targeting ling cod (no relation), yelloweye rockfish and halibut. Almost no one specifically targets acific cod, no one except us.
Four of us, in the last throes of a three-day salmon/halibut junket between Prince of Wales and Ketchikan are specifically targeting true cod for the winter freezer. We’re drifting over a large 20-fathom flat, watching the fish finder for blips of baitfish and feeling lucky.
The bank is rich in feed, cod and pollock smolts are in here by the ton, walls of krill, small herring molded into massive balls. In August, the bank is rich with food and attracts every feeder in the area; kings, halibut, rockfish and—Pacific cod. Several miles wide, from 150 to 220 feet deep, fairly flat with a hard bottom, the bank is ideal cod cover. There’s a mild 11-foot tide swing today and a light chop on the water. I couldn’t have scripted more ideal drifting conditions.
Pacific cod are demersal, bottom huggers, living exclusively within a few feet of the sea floor. In the winter they collect in concentrations on shelf edges and slopes 328 to 820 feet deep (they’ve been found as deep as 2,871 feet), but when the weather sweetens the massive schools start moving into shallower water. By summer the big schools are in less than 328 feet and often between 100 and 200 feet—easy range for bottom thumping with standard jigging gear.
The game plan is
1) find bait,
2) drift ‘till we hit a concentration of cod,
3) drop anchor,
4) fill the fish box.
While cod fishing doesn’t require specialized gear, (it can be done with a handline for Pete sake) the right tackle can make a difference in production and comfort.
My cod jigging weapon of choice was recommended by John Posey, head honcho at Lamiglas Rods and it’s been
a workhorse for not only heavy-duty cod fishing, but a sporty stick for lings, rockfish and eater halibut. It’s a specialized jigging stick, a Tri Flex Graphite 6 ½ foot BL 6620C rated for three ounces of weight with 20-pound test line.
In deeper water, Posey recommended stepping up to a rod that will handle 6-ounces of lead and 30-pound line, like the BL 6630C—a heavier version of my jigger.
Other rods to consider are the Seeker Hercules Series, 7-foot composites with a medium-slow action, and the Shakespeare 6-foot one-piece Ugly Stik.
The designed jigging rod has enough length to pump and derrick an open-mouthed true cod 200 feet to the surface, enough backbone for the job and a fast stout tip to drive the hooks home. Both are solid rods for jigging cod depths.
I add a sliver of herring belly to the 5/0 Siwash hook on a four-inch Point Wilson Dart herring pattern and flip it over the side in free fall. It piles into the bottom, I crank two turns on the reel handle, flip the rod tip up twice and on the third bounce the cod nails it. With the no-stretch braid line and the sensitive but stiff tip on the jigging rod, I can almost see what’s happening in the depths. The fish spirals up like a sock full of anchor weights. I’m guessing 8 pounds but not surprised when it turns into another five pounder.
On the other side of the boat, there’s a double at the rail and my friend with the wimpy 10-foot mooching rod has his handsful. Too little backbone, too big a bucketmouth. With the jigging rods, we land our fish and get back in the water, while my friend is still pumping the noodle.
I pick a jigging stick a little on the light side, simply because I love to wrestle heavy fish on light gear, but I’ve found that most anglers that I’ve fished with prefer 30-pound rated rods. Less wear and tear on back muscles, they claim.
These fat, gray, chin-whiskered, google-eyed fish don’t make line-gobbling runs, but they often come in with their bucket mouths wide open creating tremendous resistance that can be a handful on rods too light or too supple.
But because they don’t run, cod are easily matched with light-saltwater conventional casting reels. I favor a reel with a minimum 5.1 retrieve ratio that helps me get the bucketmouth topside as fast as possible. Where true cod are concerned the goal is not the fight, it’s the fillet and the quicker you get your fish to the boat, the quicker you can catch the next one.
Lightweight reels won’t wear out the arm like the traditional heavy squidding reels. All a decent cod jigging reel needs is enough line capacity to hit bottom (175 yards of 20-pound test is plenty), a large cranking handle for leverage and zip line retrieve ratios. Dozens of small but tough saltwater bait-casting reels, the type often used for salmon fishing, will qualify for cod jigging—reels like a Shimano Tourium, the venerable red Ambassadeur 7000, or Penn’s OM 2000.
Old timer, high-profile squidding reels work, but they’re heavier than necessary and by the end of a long day jigging, weight counts.
Whichever reel you pick, load it with braid. The small diameter resists kiting in a running current, holds bottom with light weight jigs and has the sensitivity to immediately telegraph pickups when bait fishing or the soft slurpy strike of a cod inhaling a jig.
With braid, I knot 6-feet of 30-pound test monofilament on for a leader and to keep the easily nicked braid away from sharp bottom obstructions. The heavy mono is also handy for swinging five-pounders into the boat.
Bait shows on the depth sounder, a carpet of green sifting across the bottom. We drop lines with 5/0 hooks and whole herring baits and two rods go down the instant they hit bottom.
George drops anchor and we swing into the school. Bait paints the bottom of the locater and where there is bait on this flat there are true cod. And true cod have a sweet spot for natural baits: herring, a slab of squid or a belly-strip of almost anything including another cod will get crunched when dropped into a school. Given a choice, though, I’ll go bait-less with a chrome-bright diamond jig or Point Wilson Dart in a bright herring finish.
Bounced in two-foot hops off the bottom these jigs are deadly on cod and there’s no bait to mess with. One of
my aha revelations of how simplistic cod fishing can be occurred three decades ago before Washington’s Puget Sound was trawled out. Stocking capped Norwegian’s in denim coats and small clinker boats would drop jigs on stout hand lines into Agate Pass, give them a few bounces and catch big true cod as fast as they could unhook and throw back. Hand-lining with a chrome or nickel finished spoon is a technique that Scandinavian fishermen polished on Atlantic cod, and when the families moved West they perfected the tactic on Pacifics. It works just as well today, but I prefer to string my spoons and Darts on a jigging rod and save the back muscles for when I need to wrestle a halibut.
My idea of the ideal cod rig is a herring-shaped chrome-finish jig with a few inches of natural bait to sweeten a 5/0 Siwash hook. Best of both worlds.
A workhorse bait rig that was shown to me by charter skipper Dewey Crockett has always been a favorite go-to rig, especially if fishing is a little tough. Crockett attached a 6-ounce round ball sinker on a 10-inch dropper to the bottom ring of a three-way swivel. A stout monofilament leader (50-pound test) with 4/0 bait hook was notted to the center ring and the mainline tied into the top ring. The heavy leader resists the tangles common with thinner leader material. We’d impale half a herring on the hook and repeatedly pound the ball weight against the bottom. “Callin’ em in,” was how Crockett described it. As I remember it, we never pounded bottom longer than 15 minutes before attracting a school.
Today, the four of us are setting jig hooks and flopping cod over the rail at a pace that would make the ol’ Norwegian hand jiggers sit up and take notice. A couple are whiskered monsters are pushing 10 pounds but most are four and 6 pounds, a typical catch.
It’s a great end to a good fish trip, I’m bringing her a cod.
To The Table
There are two reasons to try for true cod: The hoot and slapstick action of hitting a feeding frenzy and putting a mountain of succulent fillets on the table.
Cod meat is white, flakey, mildly sweet and more delicate than halibut if gill-cut and bled when caught. We fillet and skin our catch and cut each fillet into two pieces: four chunks per fish and either freeze in saltwater or vacuum pack in meal-size portions. Cod sometimes get a bad wrap as being “wormy.” Truth is all fish—salmon, halibut, lings, pile perch and true cod have worms. These are parasites, anisakid nematodes, that are almost always in the body cavity or under the skin and almost never in the edible fillet. Nematodes are destroyed by normal cooking temperatures and pose no health problem, according to food scientists.
I’ve yet to find a bad way to fix cod fillets, except by overcooking, but it’s tough to beat baked or battered.
Try one of these and feel free to experiment with ingredient variations.
Oven Baked Cod for Four
1½ cups plain, seasoned or cheesy breadcrumbs
½ cup fresh parsley
2 cloves of garlic
¾ teaspoon sea salt
Zest of one lemon.
4 8-ounce cod fillets
olive oil
Preheat oven to 400°F
Line baking pan with aluminum foil and lightly brush with olive oil, or cooking spray.
Combine parsley, garlic, lemon zest and salt and finely chop on a cutting board.
Combine chopped ingredients with breadcrumbs on a shallow plate.
Brush top of each fillet with olive oil, and press fillet into the crumb mixture.
Place fillets in baking dish, crust-side up.
Bake until firm, about 12-15 minutes, depending on the thickness of the fish.
Serve on a bed of fresh chives, or pulverized Macadamia nuts, with lemon wedges.
Alaskan Fish and Chips
2 cod fillets
¾ cup white flour
2 teaspoons sea salt
1 teaspoon cracked pepper
1 egg
1 tablespoon water
In deep-wall frying pan add peanut oil (vegetable oil will work), filling about a quarter of the way up the pan. Cut each fillet into 3 pieces and dry on paper towels.
Heat oil to 375 °F.
On a plate, mix flour with salt and pepper.
In a bowl mix egg and water
Dredge cod pieces in flour on all sides, shake off excess and dip dredged pieces into egg wash, then again into flour, shake off excess and place fillet in hot oil.
Don’t crowd the pan.
Fry until lightly browned 2 to 5 minutes depending on thickness.
Turn each piece at least twice.
Drain oil on paper towels and serve with tartar sauce, dark vinegar, heaps of oven-baked French fries, and an Alaskan Amber.
