Bait Fish

[MrHunters]

I am mostly, plug, tube and worm, herring, and mackeral type of guy.

That being said do people throw different names at the same type of bait fish they are using?

An episode of OTW this prior week or so, showed a guy jigging up some scup and then live lining it. He refered to it as scup once and porgie another, could have said pogie and i just heard an r but i don't know...with all the bait fish that swim through in a season its hard for the new guy to get a handle on quick names and slang for given fish...

my main question is are their slangs, name a/b for certain baits that are around at any given point of the seasnon

[In The Surf]

You heard correct scup/porgie.

Kind of like:

menhadden/bunker/pogie
herring/bucky
tautog/blackfish
squeteague/weakfish
bluefish/#$*%@%bloos

[Finaddict]

Scup is the name for Porgy from about mid-way up the CT coastline - and from there up they are referred to as Scup. From mid-CT down the coast (LI, NJ, etc.) they are referred to as Porgy.

Same geographical delineation for pogie and bunker, although I hear bunker more and more from anglers up this way.

Once the bunker get south of jersey, the pogie/bunker reference starts to shift from bunker to menhaden, although I am not sure exactly where that takes place.

[MrHunters]

thanks... originally i thought it was kind of a dumb question,but clearly there's an eastside westside war going on...

is menhadden menhadden or are there variants in the species?

is shad in a catagory all its own?

[Mike P]

We get two varieties of shad in the salt---American shad and hickory shad. The shad you hear the FW bassn' guys talk about on TV are either threadfin shad or gizzard shad.

Hickory shad can be a blast to catch on light tackle--they'll hit small metal lures, and put on an aerial display. Some people refer to them as poor man's tarpon

Menhaden, bunker, mossbunker, pogies et al are all popular names for the fish known scientifically as Tyrannus Brevooris

[MrHunters]

when typically will you start seeing hickory shad around here?

[piemma]

If you go around SOCO RI right now you can find Hickories if you know where to look.