Banded Rudderfish From The Rocks

Over the years I've caught a decent number of banded rudderfish in southern New England. Banded rudderfish, Seriola zonata, area carangid fish similar to almaco jacks. They're highly pelagic, and in their younger years largely associate to floating structure like weeds mats, buoys, or driftwood. They're also known to follow sharks. When I've caught them in local waters its generally when they pile up under navigation buoys. I'd never caught them from the rocks until quite recently. 

Banded rudderfish follow warm water eddies off the gulf stream and wander into our waters in August and September when temperatures are near their peak. Not every season provides particularly good fishing for them and the windows are often short. of course, most anglers don't know or care about these little oddballs anyway. That's where I come in: the weird, the underappreciated, the obscure... that's my niche. I always spend at least a little bit of time each season looking for these oddballs. Sometimes with oddballs it's best to let them find you, though. In the final days of August I headed east in search of scombrids, and instead of catching those- though they were indeed around -I got a nice surprise in the form of a big school of rudders.

In the water, they looked like a fleet of white torpedoes running up and down the rocks harassing the silversides. Their attacks were quite coordinated, reminding me of similar patterns I've seen in scombrid species. Indeed both cargangids and scombrids school and coordinate in similar fashion, both being evolved for high speed attacks on schools of bait. Unlike scombridae the rudderfish moved up and down the rocks at a slower pace, affording far more shots than would little tunny or bonito. All I had to do was get a flash peanut in their midst. 

One of the interesting thinks about banded rudderfish is that as they grow, they actually lose those name-sake bands. In fact they can alter pigmentation at a moments notice even as juveniles, becoming patternless or heavily banded at the drop of a dime. This sometimes leads to confusion when people are trying to identify them. There are similarly shaped and patterned fish in the same genus, including lesser amberjacks, and distinguishing them can be difficult at times. But most are exceedingly rare inshore anyway.

What banded rudders do, other than look cool, change color, and feed in interesting ways, is fight like hell. For their size and even on a rod as heavy as an 8wt, these little buggers pullllll. What I really want to do, if they linger around, is bring the 1wt out there with me and get some to really scream some drag. 

Hopefully these little buggers will linger for a while. Their presence in our waters is so fleeting, as with the other exotics, I want to get it while it lasts.

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