Jeffreys Ledge is a hump of gravel and rock that runs for thirty miles off New Hampshire and Massachusetts, twenty miles out from Gloucester and a hundred and some feet down, and it has been feeding New England since before there was a New England. The cod are mostly gone from it, or mostly protected, which from the rail of a party boat amounts to the same thing. What is left is the haddock, and in October, when the summer dogfish clear out and the water cools, they stack up on the ledge in schools you can see on the sounder like a thunderhead.
I went out on a head boat from Gloucester that left at six and smelled, in the correct order, of diesel, coffee, and clams. There were twenty of us on the rail, regulars who had their spot staked by five thirty and a bachelor party from Worcester who had been up all night and said so. The mate was a kid named Tobin who could bait a two-hook rig with sea clam faster than I could find the hook. He told us the drill. Drop to bottom, crank two turns, wait. When it feels like somebody tapping on the door, that is a haddock. When it feels like somebody pulling the door off, that is a pollock, and you should hang on.
It took eighty minutes to reach the ledge and about ninety seconds for the first fish. The haddock came in doubles, gray-backed with the black thumbprint behind the gill that the old-timers say is where Saint Peter picked one up. They are not a fighting fish. They are a dinner fish, and they come up with the resignation of a fish that knows it. The bachelor party outfished the regulars for the first hour, mostly on volume and noise, and then went quiet one by one and lay down on the cabin benches like dominoes.
We moved three times along the ledge as the drift carried us off the fish. The swell came up at midday, a long October roll out of the northeast that the captain said was nothing and the Worcester contingent disagreed with. I caught a cod the length of my arm, held it for a photo, and sent it back down, which is what you do with cod on Jeffreys these days unless you want to read the regulations twice. Everybody had a limit of haddock by one in the afternoon, and Tobin cleaned them on the way in at the stern with gulls hanging over his shoulder like a jury.
I took home a bag of fillets heavy enough to count as luggage and the knowledge that twenty miles out of Gloucester in October, the ocean is still generous to anyone who can hold a rod and stand up at the same time. The bachelor party could do one of those things. The groom, I am told, was married on Saturday and has not mentioned the boat since.
Everything in the cooler drinks better with her name on it. See our koozies, coozies and drinkware, drawn from a photo of your own boat.