How to Catch Pacific Cod Around Vancouver Island: Depth, Habitat & Metal Jigging
Here in BC, Pacific cod are also commonly called grey cod.
They’re pretty easy to recognize once you’ve seen a few. They have three separate dorsal fins, two anal fins, and a noticeable little barbel under the chin.
And personally, I think they’re one of the best-eating fish we have on the West Coast.
The meat is white, tender and very clean tasting. One of my favourite ways to cook them is in a simple fish soup. You really don’t need much — a little white pepper at the end and that’s about it.
The flavour is incredible.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve also noticed a lot more Pacific cod showing up around southern Vancouver Island. They were definitely caught here before, but based on what I’ve seen myself and heard from other local anglers, we seem to be running into them much more often lately.
As someone who loves eating grey cod, I’m definitely not complaining.
So, how do you actually find them?
After targeting Pacific cod quite a few times now, there’s one thing that stands out to me more than anything else.
It’s not lure colour.
It’s not some fancy jigging technique.
It’s depth.
1. Find the Right Depth
From my own experience around southern Vancouver Island, 250 to 400 feet has been my sweet spot for Pacific cod.
I’ve caught very few of them shallower than 250 feet.
That doesn’t mean Pacific cod don’t come into shallower water. They absolutely can. This is simply what I’ve noticed from my own fishing in this area.
Once I get past roughly 250 feet, my confidence goes way up.
You can obviously fish deeper than 400 feet too. The problem is that recreational fishing starts becoming a lot more work.
If the current is moving, keeping your jig on the bottom gets harder. And if you’re not using an electric reel, dropping a 300g, 400g or 500g jig down 500 or 600 feet — and then cranking it all the way back up — gets old pretty quickly.
For me, 250–400 feet is a nice balance between finding fish and still enjoying the fishing.
How I search a new area
If I’m fishing somewhere new, I don’t immediately decide:
“The cod are going to be at 300 feet.”
I’d rather work my way through different depths:
200 ft → 250 ft → 300 ft → 350 ft → 400 ft
Give each depth a try.
Once we start getting fish at a certain depth, I’ll look for more water nearby with a similar depth and bottom.
And if you catch one Pacific cod, don’t be too quick to leave.
Drop again.
If the second one comes up, and then a third, there’s a good chance you’ve found a group of fish.
2. What Kind of Bottom Should You Look For?
When most of us think about bottom fishing around Vancouver Island, we immediately think:
Rocks. Reefs. Drop-offs.
And if I’m looking for lingcod, those are exactly the kinds of places I want to check.
Pacific cod are a little different.
They’re often associated with softer bottom, so when I’m specifically looking for grey cod, I don’t spend all my time searching rocky structure.
I also look for:
· Mud or muddy bottom
· Sand
· Sand and gravel
· Relatively flat bottom
· Edges where the depth starts changing
· Areas holding bait or other food near the bottom
This also explains why Pacific cod are sometimes caught while fishing for halibut over muddy bottom.
If somebody tells me they regularly catch halibut in an area and the water is somewhere around 250–400 feet deep, I’m definitely interested in dropping a jig down there to see what happens.
3. What Do Pacific Cod Eat?
Pacific cod aren't particularly picky eaters.
They’re opportunistic predators, and their diet can include clams, worms, crabs, shrimp and smaller fish. As they grow larger, fish become a more important part of their diet.
And I think this tells us something useful as anglers:
Your jig doesn't have to be a perfect copy of a real baitfish.
Think about what a metal jig is doing close to the bottom.
It drops quickly.
Stops.
Jumps.
Flutters sideways.
Falls again.
Every time it does that, it creates movement, flash, vibration and water displacement.
Something down there notices it.
And sometimes that's all it takes to get eaten.
That's one of the reasons I really like metal jigs for Pacific cod.
4. Why Metal Jigs Work So Well for Pacific Cod
For deepwater fishing, metal jigs have one huge advantage:
They get down.
If the fish are sitting in 350 feet of water and your lure can't reliably reach 350 feet, it really doesn't matter how beautiful the lure looks.
So when I'm jigging for Pacific cod, this is roughly how I think about things:
Find the fish
↓
Reach the right depth
↓
Keep the jig in the strike zone
↓
Jigging action
↓
Colour
Colour is pretty far down my list.
That's also why 300g, 350g, 400g and even 500g jigs can be so useful when you're fishing deep water with some current.
It's not because:
“Big cod want a big, heavy lure.”
The weight is there so you can get down quickly and maintain control of your jig.
That's the important part.
5. How Heavy Should Your Jig Be?
There's no perfect jig weight for every situation.
It depends on several things:
Depth, current, boat drift, line diameter and the shape of the jig itself.
But there's one rule that matters more than anything else to me:
You need to know when your jig hits bottom.
If you can't tell whether you're on the bottom, you're already making things much harder for yourself.
As a rough starting point, this is what I'd use:
|
Water Depth |
Light Current |
Stronger Current |
|
100–200 ft |
100–200g |
200–300g |
|
200–300 ft |
200–300g |
300–400g |
|
300–400 ft |
300–400g |
400–500g |
|
400 ft+ |
400–500g |
500g+ |
Don't treat this table as a rule. It's just a starting point.
The better rule is:
Use the lightest jig that still lets you stay in control and clearly feel the bottom.
If you're in 300 feet and a 200g jig is dropping fairly straight down and you can clearly feel it touch bottom, there's no reason to automatically switch to 400g just because you're fishing deep.
On the other hand, if your 300g jig is getting swept way behind the boat, your line angle keeps increasing and you're not even sure if you've reached bottom anymore...
Go heavier.
At that point, worrying about whether orange or silver is better doesn't make much sense.
Your jig might not even be where the fish are.
6. What Colour Works Best?
This is probably where my opinion is a little different from some anglers.
I think we sometimes worry way too much about colour.
I personally like orange and blue.
One of my fishing buddies loves silver.
But when we're fishing side by side, I honestly haven't seen one of those colours consistently destroy the others. We all catch fish.
I think there's a trap we anglers fall into:
“The more realistic my lure looks, and the brighter the colour, the more fish will want it.”
But that's looking at a fishing lure through human eyes.
At 300 or 400 feet, the light down there is completely different from what we see at the surface. Different wavelengths of light disappear as you go deeper, so that bright orange, red, blue or pink jig in your hand isn't necessarily going to look the same hundreds of feet underwater.
And fish aren't necessarily inspecting your lure and thinking:
“Wow, that looks exactly like a herring.”
They're responding to other things too:
Movement. Contrast. Flash. Vibration. Water displacement.
Sometimes it's simply something different suddenly moving through their environment.
So before I spend too much time wondering:
“Should I use orange or silver today?”
I'm asking:
Am I actually on the bottom?
Am I fishing the right depth?
Is my jig staying where the fish are?
Once I've got those things figured out, then I'll worry about colour.
Having said all that...
If you put a box of jigs in front of me and tell me to pick one first?
I'm probably grabbing orange.
No complicated scientific reason.
It's caught me a lot of fish.
7. And Most Importantly… How Do You Cook Pacific Cod?
Now we're getting to the important stuff.
If you've never made soup with fresh Pacific cod:
Try it. Seriously.
The meat is soft, white and delicate, and the flavour is very clean.
You don't need to bury it under a pile of seasoning either.
Make a simple fish soup and add a little white pepper near the end.
That's it.
It's ridiculously good.
Another one of my favourite ways to cook grey cod is simply steamed.
When it's cooked properly, the flesh separates into beautiful big white flakes. It's tender, juicy and has very little of that strong “fishy” taste some people don't like.
And honestly, sometimes that's the best part of fishing.
Not the bite.
Not fighting the fish.
Not even seeing it come over the side of the boat.
It's getting home at the end of the day and putting a fish on the table that you pulled up yourself from a few hundred feet below the boat.
That's one of the reasons I love Pacific cod so much.
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