Captain Terry Nugent
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When a US angler mentions redfish fishing, one species comes to mind: red drum, widely known as redfish in its range — a large drum caught primarily inshore, often in very shallow water, in the Southeast and Mid- Atlantic states. But Capt. Terry Nugent, with Riptide Charters in Sandwich, Massachusetts, caught a different type of redfish in 400 feet of water off Chatham, Massachusetts.
“I’ve landed a few of these over the years,” he said of the fish in his photo. The fish are marketed as redfish, he added, “but they’re clearly not red drum. What are they really?” He also asks how big they are, what is the normal depth to encounter them, and what is their range.
Nugent did catch a redfish. That is the correct common name for the four species in the genus Sebastes. Two of those species were caught in Massachusetts, said Mike Fahay, a Northeast marine fish expert: St. is bandagedthe Acadian redfish, and S. mentalathe deepwater redfish.
These species are part of the rockfishes complex (genus Sebastes) important to Pacific Northwest recreational and commercial fisheries. They are in no way related or similar to drums and croakers, such as the red drum.
Fahay said that, based on the depth of the take, it was likely the Acadian redfish, usually from 400 to 900 feet. In fact, the species – found from Iceland to the south of the Mid-Atlantic – at one time supported an important, major commercial fishery and was a common item in Northeast fish markets. But it’s an often-told story: Landings fell from 60,000 metric tons in 1942 to more than 300 metric tons landed in 1996. The species is now considered endangered by the IUCN, but NOAA says it is not. overfished.
Like all rockfish species, redfish are slow-growing and long-lived, increasing their susceptibility to overfishing. These days, most of the catches weigh under two pounds, Fahay reports. (The IGFA all-tackle record, caught in 2010, weighed a whopping 2 ½ pounds.) On one occasion, redfish weighing up to 24 pounds were caught.
