Growing up in New Jersey in the 1990s, I didn’t fish for tautog, or blackfish, and rarely heard them mentioned. This member of the wrasse family has thrived from Maine to Virginia for thousands of years, but they were largely associated with a blue-collar crowd of anglers who were willing to brave the cold of winter to put food on the table. So how did we get from a fish associated with meager means to one with a skyrocketing market price and aisles full of specialized, pricey tackle? Let’s start with a serving of lobster.

Delicious and tricky to hook, tautog (also known as blackfish) have become a popular fish to target.

Lobster didn’t become a food associated with wealth until the early 1900s. As train travel boomed, rail companies realized they could purchase canned lobster dirt cheap. Subsequently, folks who had never tasted the crustacean found out it was delicious. Chefs soon learned that a whole lobster cooked live tasted even better. And the price went up. Prior to this boom, lobsters were served to prisoners. People thought they were too hideous-looking to eat. Such is the story of the tautog, or at least part of it.

The ’tog is a dull gray with a bulbous head and thick, rubbery lips that hide a set of conical fangs reminiscent of the vampire Nosferatu’s ghastly chompers. Those teeth, however, are designed for very specific prey: crabs, clams, mussels and shrimp. You are what you eat, and the tautog’s shellfish diet makes it one of the most delicious fish in the Atlantic.

My good friend Capt. Eric Kerber has been running charters out of Belmar, New Jersey, for 15 years. Like me, he has no recollection of tautog scuttlebutt from his youth and, like most anglers in the Northeast, didn’t want to hear about a fish if it wasn’t a striped bass, a fluke or a weakfish. Man, has that changed.

Improvements to tackle have helped anglers find more success with tautog. Modern trolling motors that alleviate the need to use two anchors to park the boat over a choice spot have also had a large impact on the fishery.

Between November 2022 and February 2023, Kerber ran 53 trips for tautog. Extrapolate that to the countless private boats and for-hire vessels that target these fish, and it’s easy to see the dramatic rise in fishing pressure. But it’s not just the fish’s delicious flesh that drove the popularity; technology is also playing a role.

Years ago, you had to harbor a unique set of skills to get your bait to sit perfectly still on a wreck or rock pile to catch tautog. This was particularly difficult in rough seas. The solution was to double-anchor over the sweet spot, which even for veteran captains can take a few attempts. It’s a lot of work. Guys used broomstick rods and heavy lead, but you had to be dialed in to detect the tautog’s subtle crunching — or scratching — at your crab. It took practice to know exactly when the fish moved the bait from its lips and into its mouth before setting the hook. Then you had to muscle it out of the structure before it “rocked you up.” The challenge made tautog fishing addictive, and as rods got lighter, faster and stronger, and braided line became the norm, a new generation of anglers began valuing ’tog as much for that challenge as the meat.

— Subscribe to the Anglers Journal Newsletter —

Members of the ’tog cult set the high-water mark at a double-digit fish weighing more than 10 pounds. The cool kids want to catch one on a jig, not the traditional bottom rig. These specialty jigs are painted to look like rocks or barnacles so they blend in with the bottom. Tip the jig with bait and deliver it on a light spinning or jigging rod for better feel, and you’ll have one hell of a fight when you stick a dandy.

In most of their range, tautog bag limits are highest in winter. In New Jersey, for example, prior to Nov. 15 you can only keep one fish per angler per day. It’s hardly worth the cost of live crabs and the effort of double-anchoring for one fish. (From Nov. 16 through the end of the year you can keep five fish per person.) A trolling motor with Spot Lock makes it much easier to tack a few ’tog drops onto a day of striper fishing in September or October.

The fish are being harassed more than ever, yet better tackle and tactics are leading to some giant catches. In January, Jennifer Zuppe landed a 23.4-pound tautog on a charter out of Ocean City, Maryland, which is the pending woman’s IGFA world record. In 2015, Kenneth Westerfeld claimed the all-tackle IGFA world record in Ocean City with a goliath weighing 28 pounds, 13 ounces. Between 2012 and 2023, seven Northeast states saw tautog records shattered. This is not because there are more big fish; it’s because more people are targeting them with improved gear.

Tautog are one of the slowest-growing fish in the ocean, making them vulnerable to overfishing. The bulk of the catch (about 90 percent) is taken by recreational anglers. A 2017 stock assessment found the coastal tautog stocks “overfished” everywhere except in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, but a 2021 stock assessment determined that tautog were no longer overfished in the four coastal regions surveyed, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.

More anglers are releasing trophy ‘tog these days, a once-unthinkable practice.

These record fish had likely been swimming around since I was in grammar school, if not earlier. A “teener” can be 40 to 60 years old, which means a 20-plus-pounder was probably munching crabs when JFK was assassinated. The larger the tautog, the more eggs it can lay. Therefore, more captains are urging or insisting clients release fish weighing 10 pounds or more. Breeding cannot keep up with the growing demand for tautog, which has never been a catch-and-release fishery.

I’ve yet to land a double-digit ’tog. A decade ago, I vowed to hang that fish on my wall when it finally happened. Now it’ll present a conundrum. As much as I love a cooler full of fillets, I know my 4-year-old son could catch that same fish in 10 years, and it’ll weigh five pounds more.