ID this fish (description, no photo) seen at Ft. Wetherill?

[nelson]

seen yesterday...

kind of like a pompano, but not so extreme in head roundness...a smallish tailfin..

bluish-black body and maybe 1 foot in length....

pretty big considering the fry normally seen (by me anyways)

also, saw two stripers ~2 feet long or maybe the same one twice??

 

[LUBOLD8431]

Tautog????

 

[Tommed]

Could it be a trigger fish?

 

[nelson]

a triggerfish? like in the Caribbean? definitely not..

is there a cold water kind of trigger???

 

[MSilvia]

You wouldn't think so, but this is the right time of year to see tropicals at that site. The Gulf Stream eddies out there, and in the past I've heard lots of reports of tropical fish there... usually juviniles.

I've personally seen a 4 spotted butterfly at 40fsw there last August, so I wouldn't be so quick to rule a trigger out as a possibility.

 

[LUBOLD8431]

Yeah, but he said it was maybe a foot in length...

Thats no juvenile tropical that I've ever seen...

I'm thinking a local fish guys...

Nobody has seemed to come up with anything... I;m still thinking blackfish...

 

[Spectre]

I've never seen a pompano, so I don't know from that. Tautog might be possible. Looking at a picture of a pompano, could it have been a bluefish?

 

[nelson]

it was a foot long (at least +/-) and pretty solid-looking....

and pretty dark blue/black

it might have been a tautog..

does someone have a good link to a picture for one that size???

 

[nelson]

black sea bass

<http://www.ctfisherman.com/cgi-bin/photopost/index.pl?photo=1973>

is this a fish common in these waters???

 

[Tommed]

I've caught eatin size trigger fish in RI at this time of year. The fish you describe could be a blackfish or a sea bass. I assumed that since both these species are so common that you were looking at a bit more exotic fish.