Fishing Copenhagen

Mackerel is widely known to be an easy fish to catch. But the giant shoals of mackerel that are currently swimming around Nordhavn have sure proven a challenging task both for me and other anglers. 

For anglers it is not uncommon to catch 10 or 20 beautiful mackerels when fishing for them from tour boats, piers or sometimes even from the coast. I´ve fished them before where they were almost too easy to catch and would hammer just about everything that I put in front of them. Unfortunately the giant shoals that are now swimming around in Nordhavn are not like that.

I´ve had two trips for them this week and caught no fish at all. It is not that the fish are not there though. Just look at this…

Shoals like this have been a normal sight on Fortkaj, Amerikakaj and Midtermolen these last days. In some of the shoals I have seen up to 200 fish. An extremely beautiful sight. Unfortunately they don´t pay much attention to the baits we´ve presented for them, and I have caught none myself. For me it has now become personal (Godfather style) and I simply have to learn how to outsmart these sneaky harbour mackerels. It doesn´t look like they are the least bit interested in normal mackerel rigs, so the preferred method is undoubtedly float fishing with small fish such as smelt and anchovy on small hooks. I had some bites on this on the second trip, but I made a few beginner mistakes and had some problems hooking them.

It was progress though, and I have made a few adjustments on my fishing setup that I hope will make the difference when I go fishing for them next week. Very small hooks, fishing depths on 3-5 meters and lots of patience seems to be the right recipe. I´ll let you know how it turns out.

Mingus knows how to do it

A young angler who have had a bit more success with the harbour mackerels is Mingus (fishing_denmark on Instagram). Yesterday he went out with a friend and caught three pretty mackerels on float and smelt. They fished the smelt in 4 meters depth and it obviously payed of.