Bluefish; Snapper (young)
It is perhaps the most ferocious and bloodthirsty fish in the sea, leaving in its wake a trail of dead and mangled mackerel, menhaden, herring, alewives, and other species on which it preys. Goode[89] wrote long ago, the bluefish, “not content with what they eat, which is itself of enormous quantity, rush ravenously through the closely crowded schools, cutting and tearing the living fish as they go, and leaving in their wake the mangled fragments.” It is not only the schooling fish that fall prey to them, but scup, squeteague, hake, butterfish, cunners, and small fish of all kinds, besides squid. Baird, writing in the 1870’s, when bluefish were at the height of their abundance, estimated that they annually destroyed at least twelve hundred million millions of fish during the four summer months off southern New England; and while this calculation surely was wildly exaggerated it will help give the reader a graphic realization of the havoc that they wreak during their periods of plenty.
From Fishes of the Gulf of Maine by Bigelow and Schroeder (1953) online courtesy of MBL/WHOI http://www.gma.org/fogm/Pomatomus_saltatrix.htm
Good Morning Gloucester 
Aram Nersesian writes …….
Long Island Sound… ~~~ 1980… I was sailing my Bristol 39 in very light air, right through a school of blues churning up the surface, and I hooked four 36″ blues on a single umbrella rig. They stopped the boat! 120# metal line… no sport, just dinner. I put on leather gloves and pulled the line in, hand over hand. Got them into the cockpit, bing bing bing bing… four hits with a winch handle… and an hour of cleaning fish later, I had slabs of fillets that fed six boats worth of friends, rafted and waiting at Oyster Bay. We had a contest: who could cook up the fish in the most tasty way? Surprisingly, Mickie and Joanie, on their Cape Dory 25, won the day. They put their fillet on the grill, wrapped in aluminum foil and smothered with Italian salad dressing. That was it. Nothing fancy, but that blue fish was out of this world.
Al Bezanson
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Great post and thanks for the lessons an wisdom here the sponge soaking it up! 🙂 Dave & Kim 🙂
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