Cape Cod Kings

WHOA! DID YOU SEE THAT?

Unfortunately, no one did. My kayak-fishing partners weren’t even close enough to hear my question. They were a quarter-mile across the bay, intensely focused, as I had been, on chasing the schools of impossibly fussy false albacore. But, that was okay. More than anyone else, I was asking the question of myself.

Desperate to find something that the albies would strike, I had tied on a 4-inch Fin-S Fish rigged weightless on an offset worm hook. I was working it through a school of breaking fish without a strike when, within 10 yards of my kayak, a silver missile shot from the water. Like an Olympic diver in reverse, it exited the water without a splash and moved through the air with perfect rigid form. Its trajectory was low and level, about a yard above the water (or eye level with me as I sat in the kayak), and it instantly covered half the distance between us before its velocity slowed. For a split second it hung in the air, and my brain registered a snapshot image loaded with detail—a gray-barred flank, a large round eye, the dark line of a mouth. By the time my reflexes caught up to my eyes and I raised my forearms to guard my face, the fish had already dropped my lure and dropped back into the water, close enough that it would have splashed me if it hadn’t nailed a perfect nose-first re-entry.

I’d watched enough Florida-based fishing shows to know definitively what I had just seen—a king mackerel.

I hustled over to Dave and Jimmy, and breathlessly described the skyrocketing fish that nearly landed in my lap. I could tell that they at least half-believed my account. As the rush of excitement subsided, it was replaced by disappointment that I hadn’t hooked up, that I didn’t have proof lying across my lap to back up my tale. I had been given a rare opportunity and missed—but I wasn’t kicking myself for long.

King Mackerel vs Spanish Mackerel

Juvenile king mackerel and Spanish mackerel can be difficult to tell apart, as the characteristic yellow spots that cover the flanks of Spanish mackerel also appear on young king mackerel.

On a king mackerel, the lateral line makes an abrupt downward dip under the second dorsal fin. The lateral line of a Spanish mackerel has a far more gradual dip. A Spanish mackerel also has a prominent black spot on its dorsal fin that does not appear on a king mackerel.

Minutes later, another silver missile rocketed out of the water, this time gripping Dave’s Sebile Magic Swimmer between its jaws, then dropping it before Dave could pick up the slack line. We all saw it, and we saw it replay a few casts later, but this time, the king mackerel stayed hooked long enough to come aboard Dave’s kayak for photos.

Catching a king mackerel in Massachusetts is unusual, but it wasn’t a complete surprise. We’d seen a handful of photos over the previous month from On The Water subscribers sharing stories of the unusually large “Spanish mackerel” they had landed while fishing for bonito, albies, and bluefish. In every case, the fish in the photo was not the (typically) more common Spanish mackerel, but the similar-looking king mackerel. While at least a few Spanish mackerel are landed every summer around the Cape and Islands—more some years, less others—king mackerel are much rarer. The last time anyone could recall seeing multiple king mackerel caught around the Cape was in 2002, when these fish were abundant enough that we fished for them in an episode from the premiere season of On The Water TV.

The 2017 run of king mackerel on the south side of the Cape peaked in mid-September, and it happened to coincide with a media event held by Hobie Kayaks. The long-planned outing brought together members of Hobie’s national fishing pro staff, outdoor writers and photographers from throughout the Northeast, and a tractor-trailer full of brand-new kayaks for three days at the Bayside Resort in West Yarmouth. The goal was the capitalize on the albie run, which is easy for kayakers to access from the beaches between Falmouth and Yarmouth.

While the albie action got off to a blazing-hot start in the first half of September, the bite slowed as the fish settled in. By the time the Hobie group assembled at Craigville Beach, the albies were abundant, but they were primarily feeding on tiny bay anchovies and ignoring almost every lure thrown at them.

Hobie pro Eric Harrison of Massachusetts quickly figured out that targeting the kings was not only possible, it was more productive than chasing the albies. While the kings occasionally attacked a fast-moving metal lure intended for an albie, trolling or casting and retrieving larger minnow-shaped plugs triggered more strikes and led to more hook-ups. Also, while the albies were focused on smaller baitfish, the kings stayed close to abundant schools of peanut bunker (juvenile menhaden). In the evening, Harrison and Connecticut-based Hobie pro Shawn Barham were able to locate a couple schools of peanut bunker under attack by a school of king mackerel. Every 5 minutes or so, the kings rushed through the bait ball at full speed—some just breaking the surface and some flying 6 feet in the air. The guys ended up catching and releasing about a dozen between them before darkness fell.

Unfortunately, the approach of Tropical Storm Jose southeast of the Cape whipped up the waters and ended the Hobie event early and put fishing on hold for a few days. When the seas settled, the albies were still around (and ended up sticking around late into October), but the kings seemed to vanish.

No one can say for certain why the kings made a strong appearance in 2017. Some credit the exceptional abundance of peanut bunker, while others thought high water temperatures in Nantucket Sound brought them in. Perhaps it was a boom year-class of kings down south that led to some of the juvenile fish to venture farther north than usual, or some combination of these three factors.

The king mackerel incursion of 2017 was unprecedented, but it’s likely that some number of these fish visit Cape Cod each season. Who knows, maybe some of the late-summer bite-offs that we blamed on bluefish were instead caused by the sharp teeth of a king mackerel. And, if more fishermen try targeting them with swimming minnow lures in late summer, perhaps we will discover king mackerel are more common visitors than previously thought.