Hake Fishing: The Predator That Feeds on the Way Down
The scorpionfish sat on one hand’s width of stone — you found it by finding a place. The hake does not live in a place, it lives inside a movement: the drop. Hake, merluza, nasello, merlu, pescada, heek, berlam, μπακαλιάρος, хек, oslić, lysing, kummel, kulmule — slim, silver, with a mouth full of backward-curving teeth. Its scientific name is built from the words for sea and pike, and the old country names still say the same thing: sea pike, brochet de mer, havsgädda. For your fishing that means one thing above all: this predator feeds upwards — and therefore on the falling bait, in exactly the phase most anglers never fish, because they only start paying attention on the lift.
Where it holds
By day it holds deep and close over soft ground: mud and sand, the rims of gullies and submarine canyons, the edge where the bottom tips away. It is not a fish of rock armour and crevices — what holds it is not hard structure but depth and what drifts through it. Its depth range is extraordinarily wide, from surprisingly shallow under the coast to far down the slope, and it moves within that range with the light and with its prey. At night it rises and hunts in open water, well off the bottom, behind sardines, anchovies and small shoaling fish. That is why it is within reach almost anywhere from a boat, but from shore only where deep water comes right in to the coast — on some Atlantic shores it moves in close enough on dark autumn and winter nights to be fished from land. Honest about range: at home in the eastern Atlantic from Norway and Iceland down to Mauritania, across the whole Mediterranean and along the fringes of the Black Sea. It does not live in the Baltic.
When it feeds
Its switch is low light. By day it sits deep, quiet and hard to reach; at dusk, through the night and in dark, murky water it lifts off the bottom and starts hunting. For the angler that means something different than with a shore fish: the spot does not move, the depth it holds does. Sit over the same edge at night and you do not fish it on the bottom, you fish it in the band it has risen into — and if the prey is not there, an hour later it will be deeper again. Then there is current: it sets up the shoaling fish it lives on, and it decides whether your bait falls straight down or drifts away sideways. Across the year its window shifts from coast to coast — on the Atlantic it belongs to the dark, cold months, while in the Mediterranean it is there all year and mainly changes depth.
How it is caught
- The fall is the fishing phase: most takes come while the bait is sinking. So do not just drop it and wait for a bang — let it sink under control, finger on the line, eyes on the bow. Fish only the lift and you are fishing the half this species takes least often.
- Vertical and in contact: from the boat over the edge, braided line, and a rod soft enough to show the sink. A lightly loaded bow gives the bite away; a free-running line swallows it.
- The bite is an absence: no knock, no rattle — the weight goes missing, the line softens for a moment, or the bait suddenly sinks more slowly. Do not strike hard: take up contact, tighten, load the rod steadily. Often it has not fully taken the bait yet, and a violent strike simply pulls it back out of its mouth.
- Scent on the metal: a strip of natural bait — sardine, anchovy, squid — on the jig or on the assist hook buys you more of the seconds it stays with the lure. Slow, soft work beats frantic ripping: it does not hunt on speed, it collects.
- It comes to you, not the other way round: at night you change depth, not spot. Hold anchor or drift over the same edge and work the band the prey is in — and from shore only start where deep water genuinely touches the coast.
And then the part that comes before technique with this species: it is the first predator in this series you cannot cleanly release. Fish deep water and you bring up a fish that suffers from the change in pressure — putting it back is often not a solution here, just a nice gesture. The consequence is uncomfortable and simple at the same time: decide before you go out how many you want to take home, and stop when you get there, instead of fishing on and sorting at the end. Second point: the small slim ones are not a different species, they are the next generation — which is exactly why many countries put a minimum size on them. And the third, which you will read almost nowhere: this fish eats its own young. The big ones are part of the system, not a bonus on top. Minimum sizes, closed seasons, bag limits and permits are set by local rules and differ from coast to coast — sort that out before the trip, not on the water.
Not the lift — the fall
With this fish, what lies between "nothing" and "a take" is not another cast but your attention during the few seconds the bait is going down — and the right depth at the right hour. Both change with light, current, weather and season, while the point on the map stays the same. That is exactly what the StrikeAhead app is built for: it reads your water with bite windows, weather and water data, map and depth contours, and it learns from your catches, so you fish the moment instead of guessing it. And with a fish that lives in deep water, the second half is almost always the shorter route: which edge, which band, which hour — somebody who already knows the water and has a boat. The app tells you when. StrikeAhead Pathfinder tells you with whom: our curated directory of fishing guides and skippers — every expert personally vetted, licence and insurance checked before listing, profiles built from real, verified catches out of the StrikeAhead logbook instead of stock photos, no paid ranking, and no booking fee for you as an angler.