Tautog are what you fish for in New England when the water starts to cool and the glamorous fish begin packing for the south. Locals call them blackfish, or just tog. They are dark, thick and rubber lipped, with front teeth that look borrowed from a small horse, and they spend their whole lives with their faces pressed against rocks. Nobody has ever put one on a postcard. Plenty of people will tell you, quietly, that it is the best eating fish in Rhode Island.
I went out of Newport at the end of September with a friend of a friend I will call Sully, who runs a twenty two foot center console and keeps his rock piles in a notebook nobody is allowed to photograph. Tog fishing is anchoring, and anchoring is the whole sport. Sully dropped the hook, drifted back, looked at the screen, said no, and pulled it. He did this four times. A boat length off the rock, he explained, is the same as being in Ohio.
The bait is green crab, cut in half with shears, hook through a leg socket. You drop it to the bottom in thirty feet of water, take up the slack, and hold the rod like a full cup of coffee. A tautog does not grab a bait and run. It crushes the crab where it sits, picks out the meat, and leaves you the shell as a receipt. The bite is two taps. Swing on the first and you are early. Wait for a third and you are reeling up a clean hook. I fed them nine crabs before I hooked a fish. Sully kept count on his fingers, then borrowed mine.
When you do connect, there are about three seconds in which the fish decides whether it lives in the boat or in the rocks. You lift hard and crank and give no line at all, because a tog that gets its head down will wedge into a crevice and stay there until you retire. Mine came up thumping the whole way, a six pound male with a white chin. Sully called it a good fish, then a better fish once he remembered who had found the rock. We kept three apiece and sent a few thick females back down.
By noon the tide went slack, the bite stopped, and the crab bucket was mostly legs. At the dock a man on the next boat asked where we had been. Sully said out front. The man nodded as if that were an answer. I have since made tautog chowder twice and been asked for the recipe both times, and I tell people the truth: the secret ingredient is nine crabs you do not get back.
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