BAY OF PIGS
Where and how to locate huge cod.
Arecent trip to Sandland Brygge in Northern Norway gave me the perfect opportunity to hone my chart-reading skills and discover some fantastic marks that were loaded with big cod. We were there during the height of the summer, which isn’t noted as being the best time for big fish – because they’re normally caught around mid-March through April. But, as ever with this magical country, there are always some big fish to be found if you go looking for them.
During this trip we only fished for the big cod on one of the days, for the rest of the holiday concentrating our efforts on the halibut and trying to find a big coalfish, but we still managed to hit the jackpot with a good handful of 40lb-plus cod and a personal best 47-pounder for one of the crew!
LOCATION
In recent years I have become obsessed with spending hours searching out marks on the Navionics app, which I have downloaded on to my iPhone and iPad. The chart data available around the world is amazing, and I get a real buzz when I travel somewhere, fish a mark that I fancied one night while sitting in my living room, and have a result.
Sandland Brygge was no different to the
last half-dozen trips abroad that I’d made. I knew we were travelling with Les McBride, who is the UK rep for the camp and knows the area like the back of his hand, and I knew there would be fish on some of the marks that I had picked out at home.
The key to finding the big cod and halibut, in my experience, is fishing a plateau. These are like underwater mountains, many of which rise up from, say, 150 metres to 75 metres. The number of big fish I have caught and witnessed being caught right smack bang on top of these plateaux reinforces the fact that they are fish-holding areas.
You’ll see from the screen grab below what I’m talking about.
Search out areas with lots of plateaux close together, starting from 100 metres-plus and rising to 60-80 metres at the top.
Also look for solitary plateaux in similar depths, where you’re more likely to find a big halibut – they’re very territorial, and a big halibut or two will keep a decent plateau all to themselves.
HOW TO FISH
This style of fishing couldn’t be easier. All you need to do is motor to the top of the plateau, stop the boat and drift off it. Once you get an idea of which way the boat is drifting with the tide and wind, you can begin to formulate a more refined approach, but to start off with you just plonk yourself on the top of it.
Sometimes you get lucky, just like wreck fishing, and wind/tide combination set you up for the perfect drift between two plateaux. Starting at the top of one, you drift down the back edge, across the deep water and up the side of the next one – it’s the Norway dream drift!
This gives you the perfect opportunity to work out where the fish are sitting. Sometimes they will be on the leading edge, or right on top of it, and other times they will be hiding somewhere down the back edge. It’s usually the case that the cod are either on top of or halfway down the back edge, which is why I always start my drifts in the way I have already explained.
The other scenario when fishing a plateau is running on to a huge shoal of coalfish. This is quite common, especially during the summer, and it’s something that produced at least three of the 40lb-plus cod we caught during this trip.
If you see a shoal of coalies on your sounder, try and stop on top of them, regardless of their depth, and drop your lures straight down through them. Nine times out of ten you will find big cod or halibut sitting underneath them. The big cod tend to follow the coalfish shoals because that’s what they like to feed on – it’s like a moving larder for them.
I like to drop my lure or pirk through the coalfish right to the seabed, then work the lure back up, stopping at three or four-metre intervals until it gets hit.
It’s a great tactic, and a very exciting way of fishing. You can often feel the coalies banging into your line, even in 100 metres of water.
TACKLE AND RIG
Fishing for these big fish requires sturdy tackle, but don’t go into overkill mode. I like to use a 20lb-class rod, and during this trip we took a bunch of my DB1 10/20lb-class rods to give them a real thrashing.
There’s no need to move up to the 30/50lbclass gear, unless you’re specifically targeting a 200lb-plus halibut.
The most important part of your armoury is a solid, powerful multiplier reel loaded with good-quality braid. I use a Shimano Talica 10II, which is only a tad larger than a 6500-size reel, but has great line capacity, fast retrieve and tough gearing, plus a silkysmooth, powerful drag system.
All these factors will make your fishing far easier and more effective.
You need a smooth, powerful drag to cope with the prolonged powerful runs that these cod make. You need decent gearing to give the reel plenty of torque for when winding the fish up under pressure. It’s also important to have the high-speed retrieve. Winding a 400g lure up from 150 metres 70 times a day can become hard work, and that’s without a big cod on the end.
I tend to go for a good-quality eight-strand braid with a tight weave in 30 or 40lb. As a rule, I use 30lb, but if I’m expecting big halibut among the cod then I’ll up it to 40lb.
You might think that the gear I’m talking about is undergunned for these fish but, trust me, it isn’t. You could get away with a heavy-duty lure rod in calm conditions – and that’s some seriously good fun.
I don’t like using a shockleader, as such, when lure fishing in Norway. I use a really
simple set-up, which has never let me down on a big fish. It’s basically a decent barrel swivel tied to the end of my braid mainline, with a 5ft length of 100lb clear mono tied to the other end, and a good-quality lure clip tied to the end of that.
I used to use Sovik link swivels, but more recently I’ve switched over to the Breakaway Fast Links - the ones that a lot of shore anglers use for attaching their lead weights to their rigs. I figure that if a Fast Link can withstand the force of a full tournament pendulum cast, then it will hold an 80lb cod. To date I’ve had no problems at all with them, and they make switching lures so much easier.
GO BIG OR GO HOME
There’s one thing that is pretty standard as far as searching out big Norwegian cod is concerned – large lures. I’ve had plenty of fun catching 20lb and even 30lb cod on the 8in Sidewinders or similar lures, but if you really want to catch a big cod then you need to increase your lure size.
On this trip I took three Royber lures with me, the smallest of which measures 10in long, with the largest a tad over 12in. This is what the 40lb-plus cod want. After all, they’re predominantly feeding on 1-3lb coalfish, so as with any other form of lure fishing, you ‘match the hatch’.
These lures are heavy, having built-in leadheads and hooks that range from 200g up to 500g, so there’s no need for any additional weight to be added to get the lure down to where the fish are – simply clip it on and drop it down.
I scored really well during this trip with a coalfish imitation pattern, but blue/ orange and green/silver are also extremely productive colour combos.
I also took three Abu Sillen 350g pirks with me on this adventure. If there’s a lot of tide running, the large paddletail of the Royber can cause a lot of drag and pull the lure away from the boat while you’re drifting. Once this happens it can be a job keeping it near the bottom in the strike zone, and this is when you’ll need to switch to a fast-drop pirk to keep fishing effectively until the tide backs off or the wind drops away (whichever is causing the boat to drift too quickly).
Be ready for instant action, though. More often than not you will drop straight on to fish, especially if you’re fishing through a shoal of coalfish that can be seen on the sounder. Usually, because of the swimming action of the large paddletail lures, the cod will hit them on the drop.
OUR SESSION
In addititon to Les McBride, the Sandland UK agent, I was fishing with my friend Mark Shreeve and my trusty sidekick, Jim Midgley. This trip was set up by Mark, and although the rest of us had caught monster Norwegian cod before, today was all about smashing Mark’s personal best, which stood at less than 20lb.
We managed to grab a break in the weather and motored 20 miles out to a huge series of plateaux that we eventually nicknamed ‘The Pig Farm’. As soon as we arrived at the first plateau we got stuck into a never-ending stream of 20lb-plus cod, with a few smaller coalies and wolf fish. It was clear that we would have our work cut out in finding the bigger cod, because there were so many fish in the area.
As we hopped from plateau to plateau we found cod to 30lb-plus with regularity. Then, as I positioned us over a series of slightly smaller plateaux, I saw a huge shoal of coalfish on the sounder. They were sitting right on top of the plateau in 75 metres of water, and I can remember shouting “jackpot” to the lads on deck as I slammed the engine astern to stop us dead.
As with the other drifts we were straight into fish, but the average size was much bigger. I hooked up to a good 40lb-plus cod on my first drop, and then Mark’s rod buckled over as he got stuck into his new PB.
We like to return all the cod we catch, unless the hosts at the camp ask us specifically to bring a couple of big fish back for them. However, seeing as how this was Mark’s PB, and we didn’t have any scales with us on board, we decided to take this one back in to weigh it because we knew the fish wouldn’t be wasted.
After several more hours with more 30lbplus cod hitting the deck than you can imagine, we decided to call it a day and head back in for some food and a celebratory beer. When we got back to the marina we took Mark’s cod into the filleting room and weighed her on the digital scales. She went bang on 47lb. Mark was over the moon.
It made us all think that we’d actually thrown back more 40-pounders than we thought. We’d caught a lot of cod of a similar size that day, and at a guesstimate I’d say we had at least eight over 40lb between us.
I’m quite certain that if we’d pushed out to the Pig Farm a couple more times we’d have found bigger cod, but we had achieved what we set out to do. ■