Have you had a good fishing life?
The main targets of shore jigging in Japan are yellowtail (buri), greater amberjack (kanpachi) and yellowtail amberjack (hiramasa). Most of them are migratory fish, so even if you keep going back to the same spot, there are days when you simply never meet them.
But you can raise your chances a lot by matching your timing to the way these fish move. In this article I want to write about how I choose the time, the day and the place for shore jigging.
Narrowing down the time of day
Most migratory fish take more than half of a day’s food in the morning. The first hour after dawn seems to be by far the most important. When I open up a yellowtail caught at first light, small baitfish come out of its stomach, but a fish caught in the middle of the day often has nothing inside at all. It matches what I feel on the rocks too: most of my bites come between dawn and an hour or two after sunrise.
Feeding times of migratory fish
Morning: they feed hard
Midday: they barely feed
Evening: they feed
Night: they do not feed at all
Your chance outside the morning window
On my own trips I usually fish a rocky shore where I can also cast egi, so once it gets past about 11 a.m. I switch to eging, then pick the jigging rod back up for the evening window before heading home.
If you do want to keep jigging through the middle of the day, watch the tide. The bites increase in the short window where a rising tide stops and turns into a falling tide. You can check when the tide turns on a Japanese tide table site.
It is a very short window, but almost every species feeds better while the water is switching direction.
Narrowing down the day
The day matters less than the time of day, but it still matters.
As I wrote above, migratory fish feed when the water is moving and changing, so a spring tide is usually a good day to go. That said, on some spots a spring tide moves the water too fast to fish at all. What you actually want is the fastest tide you can still fish comfortably. If you fish somewhere with strong flow, such as the Akashi Strait or the Naruto Strait, a big spring tide can cut your fishable time down to almost nothing.
This is true of other species as well: fish tend to feed on days and at times when the water is moving. That is exactly what Japanese fishing shows mean when the host sighs and says the tide is not running today. There are exceptions, of course, but if you have to go out on a neap tide, choose a place where the water moves well.
Even inside a single harbour there are corners where the current runs and corners where it does not. On some rocky shores the fish come on when the tide pushes right, and the same spot dies completely when it pushes left. That local detail is worth writing down every time you go.
Choosing the place
When you are after migratory fish, the choice of place is the biggest factor of the three. You need a place these fish actually pass through. They do not swim the same line every day, so it will always be a game of probability, but you can absolutely find places where the probability is high.
Face the open sea, and know the seasonal windows
The big yearly movements of migratory fish are reasonably fixed. Take the cutlassfish of Osaka Bay: they winter in the Kii Channel, start moving north in spring, push into the back of Osaka Bay from both sides of Awaji Island through summer, gather into large schools in the bay in autumn, and drop back into the Kii Channel for winter. Water temperature drives most of it.
Some of these migration patterns are just what fishermen and anglers say to each other. Others have been tracked properly with GPS tags and published as research. Yellowtail is one of the well studied ones, so let me use it as the example.
The yellowtail’s migration through the year
Yellowtail has been studied in some detail, and probably because of the difference in water temperature, the fish on the Sea of Japan side and the fish on the Pacific side behave completely differently.
Sea of Japan side
Spring: as the water warms, they run north fast, out of the East China Sea and past Tsushima.
Summer: the northbound fish reach the area around the Tsugaru Strait.
Autumn: as the water cools they either slip through the Tsugaru Strait onto the Pacific side and head south, or track south down the Sea of Japan coast.
Winter: around the turn of the year they arrive off Kyushu, spawn in the warm East China Sea by early spring, and start the loop again.
In recent years rising sea temperatures have pushed their range further north, and yellowtail landed in southern Hokkaido is no longer unusual.
Pacific side
The Pacific side pattern is far more complicated, and it looks like it splits into several separate loops.
Sotobo, Chiba to the Kumano Sea, Mie
A small loop from summer through winter, spawning off Cape Muroto in spring, then back again.
The Kii Peninsula to Cape Ashizuri
They spend summer around the Kii Peninsula and Osaka Bay, move to Cape Muroto and Cape Ashizuri as the water cools, spawn in the Hyuga Sea, and return.
Around Kyushu
Fish that summer near the Bungo Channel drop past Cape Ashizuri and the Hyuga Sea as the water cools, spawn off southern Satsuma, and complete the circle.
Looking at it that way, the Sea of Japan fish, the Sotobo fish, the Kii Peninsula fish and the Kyushu fish each seem to have their own loop. This is a rough sketch, and being outside the window does not mean you cannot catch anything. But on the Sea of Japan side, the gap between the good season and the dead season really is severe.
The yellowtail’s daily pattern
The daily movement is much simpler. In the feeding windows, morning and evening, they drive baitfish in close to the shore. In the middle of the day and at night, when they are not feeding much, they move back out.
Putting the yellowtail pattern to work
Taken together, the places where yellowtail is caught shift a little at a time within one region as the season moves. The practical answer is to look for somewhere nearby that is already producing fish, and go there.
And because these are migratory fish, a spot facing the open sea gives you a better chance. That said, the Pacific side loops are small, so depending on the baitfish situation you can catch them in water that does not face the open sea at all.
To sum up the conditions for a good place and time:
・good tidal flow, such as a strait or a shore facing the open sea
・a place the fish should be passing through around now, based on the yearly pattern
・a place where catches have started coming in nearby
・a spring tide, or a day close to one, fished at dawn
Line those up and you are a real step closer to a yellowtail.
What we know about yellowtail amberjack
Research on yellowtail migration has come a long way, but yellowtail amberjack is still full of blanks. Whether they migrate at all, where they are in which season, most of it is still unclear.
What we do know: there are far more of them on the Sea of Japan side than on the Pacific side, and from April to June they spawn in the shallows around Cape Kyogamisaki in Kyoto, which is when the big ones show up. In autumn they come well around Hamada in Shimane and the Goto Islands.
Beyond that, it seems they do not make long runs the way yellowtail does, and some individuals simply hold on one piece of structure and stay there. So compared with yellowtail, you have a real chance at a resident fish even when nothing is migrating past. Their daily pattern is unclear too, but for whatever reason I catch more of them after the dawn window has closed, somewhere around 10 or 11 a.m.
How to decide where and when to go shore jigging
Yellowtail runs both a daily loop and a yearly one. When you can predict the run, go to that place at dawn on a day with plenty of tidal movement. Yellowtail amberjack is less understood, but some fish stay resident on a rocky shore, so pick a shore that produces regularly and get there early.
That is the end of the homework. From here you just pick your day, pick your place, and go fishing.
When and where to go for aori squid — the same thinking about tide and season, applied to eging.
Spike or felt? Choosing shoes for rocky shores — read this before your first trip onto the rocks.
Eging gear for beginners — for the middle of the day, when the jigging bite dies.
