Bluefish are a fish of the people. 

They readily gobble up flies, plugs, soft plastics and chunks, yet bluefish are disparaged as a trash fish — the lowliest of epithets in the angling world. They’re dubbed “chopper” or “gator,” sometimes said with abject contempt due to their proclivity for slashing leaders and taking off with plugs intended for the more forgiving yet revered maws of a striped bass. Others use the term gator with a sense of endearment for the blue’s ferocity. Whatever you call them and wherever you catch them, I have become humbler in their presence, and those who haven’t should.

The aggressive nature of the lowly bluefish deserves some admiration.

Bluefish are brutes in every anthropomorphic sense. Biologists have counted 70 different species in their stomachs. Yet that doesn’t mean they are indiscriminate garbage cans requiring little to no finesse to entice. Not always, at least.

The bluefish was the quotidian bread-and-butter species of my sporting youth. In my native, semiurban waters of Long Island Sound, fishing may have never held my attention were it not for my entangled love affair with bluefish. It may well be the bluefish alone that indoctrinated me into this fishing life in the first place. Both of my grandfathers were avid — if middling — anglers who, rest their fishing souls, were heavily indebted to bluefish for what I can only gather was the majority of their fishing outings.

Chasing panfish in ponds was enchanting and contributed to my predilection, but damned if my head wasn’t blown when my father arrived home from a kayak outing one day smothered from head to toe in fish blood. My dad is not a brawling man, and I searched, slack-jawed, for the right way to ask, “What happened?” When he growled back, “bluefish,” I realized there’s more to this sport than bluegills. It was all I needed to hear. Nothing bled like that back in the sweetwater where he’d been taking me fishing.

From then on, my sights were set on the brine.

Striped bass hunters may curse “chopper” bluefish in the surf after losing a plug to tho

Shortly after that, a friend and I took to flipping Acme Side-Winders and Kastmasters at snapper blues from an Interstate 95 bridge underpass after school. Once we’d put up a half-dozen or so, we’d wrap them in newspaper and steal off to the woods to clean and cook them over a fire, devouring cheeks, eyeballs and just about all else. So fanatical were we about a snapper fix that while sentenced to summer school one year, we would regularly show up late, splattered in blood and wreaking of our catch. We didn’t garner much favor among our comrades, but we ate what we caught, and we were damn proud of it.

The opportunist and epicurean in me is zealous in believing that when given the right treatment — immediately bled, filleted and skinned, with the bloodline removed — along with a combination of acid and fat, bluefish will stand up to any fish preparation. And with striper populations and regulations where they are right now, it’s high time we treat our blues with the esteem they deserve.

While I’ll concede that bluefish meat doesn’t hold up well even a day out of the water, when served fresh, the meat is supple and soft, not dissimilar to mackerel. And even at that, it depends upon where you encounter them. Whether it’s their forage or the water temperature, bluefish caught south of the Carolinas tend to be mushy and riddled with parasites. I won’t knock my Southern brethren for turning up their noses at that. But north of, say, Maryland or Delaware, fresh bluefish is a delight.

Across the Atlantic, bluefish are not just welcomed, but sought after by sport anglers and fishmongers in the Mediterranean. They fetch top dollar in Algerian markets, and Italian cuisine displays a particular fondness for blues. Search pesce serra (literal translation “saw fish”) followed by ricetta, and you will find hundreds of venerable, celebratory recipes. The same cannot be said stateside, where a procession of smoked bluefish dip recipes call for more mayonnaise and cream cheese than fish.

The quality of bluefish as table fare is often debated.

It is with deep gratitude and verbal thanks that I occasionally dispatch a bluefish as carefully as I can manage, reveling in how the meat will plump up in a casserole dish with wine, paprika and fresh thyme. Sure, it can be a bit more of a challenge than serving up flaky-white fluke filets or beet-red bricks of bluefin tuna, but success is all the sweeter with bluefish — especially when I’m able to dupe naïve dinner guests into believing it’s tuna. Either way, in doing so, I feel like that kid on the beach and in the kitchen staring agape at my father’s blood-stained summer whites.

The bluefish is not quite the silver king, but it is a sterling gamefish in its own, if somewhat less acrobatic and relatively diminutive, right. To think they can be caught so many different ways in so many different zones is outright mesmerizing. Bluefish prowl shallow intertidal waters where they can ambush prey from ledges or zip across mudflats. They frequent deeper rips, channel edges and rocky reefs, and they breed miles offshore. On any given day, their proclivity may vary from a 2-inch Clouser to a 10-inch popper. Pound-for-pound, the bluefish is the toughest fighter in my home waters.

You don’t want to get your fingers too close to the jaws of a bluefish. 

Still, blues get a bad rap. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t harbored my own contempt for bluefish. The captain I mated for as a teenager would order me to club them to death in a way he would never have me dispatch the more honorable stripers. We pulled so many blues over the rail at times that I’d lose track of the club and use the back of my hand, karate chopping them and cursing as I did it.

These days, I am utterly thrilled at the sight of a gator blue, casting enthusiastically at a passing pod of tailors while others gaze elsewhere for something better. There is nothing better, and if you don’t see that, you’re missing the point.