If you only ever catch one thing from your boat in France, it will be mackerel, and that is no bad thing. They are the perfect family fish: abundant, easy, fast to catch, gorgeous to eat, and forgiving of the most cack-handed nine-year-old with a rod. My children learned to fish on mackerel off the Brittany coast, and the day my youngest pulled up six at once on a string of feathers remains, in her telling, the greatest sporting achievement of her life.
Here is everything a cruising family needs, from a parent who has untangled a great many feather rigs.
Why mackerel are the family fish
Mackerel travel in shoals, they are aggressive feeders, and in summer they come right up into the surface layers where you can reach them with the simplest tackle in the world. You do not need skill, bait, or quiet. You need to be in the right water at the right time and to drop a string of feathers over the side. When the shoal is under the boat, a child will catch fish, and there is nothing that lights up a young face like a rod bending under three fish at once.
They are also genuinely good eating, oily and rich, best the day they are caught, and they cook in minutes. A family supper of fresh mackerel that the kids hauled up themselves, cooked at anchor as the sun goes down, is the kind of cruising memory people chase for years.
When and where: timing beats everything
Mackerel are a summer fish in northern French waters. They move inshore as the water warms and the season runs broadly from late spring through to autumn, with early June after spawning being a classic peak and the fish at their fattest later in summer after a season of feeding. On the Atlantic coast and around Brittany, where summer sea temperatures sit between 15C and 19C, June to September is your window. On the Mediterranean they are less reliable but still about.
Finding them is the only real skill. Look for the signs:
- Birds working a patch of water, diving repeatedly, almost always means a bait shoal being driven up from below, and mackerel are often the drivers.
- Ripples or "nervous water", a patch of surface that looks different from the rest, fizzing slightly, is bait being harried.
- Other boats clustered and clearly jigging tells you the locals have found them.
Mackerel feed best in the cooler parts of the day, early morning and the last hours of light, and on a moving tide. Flat, hot, slack midday water is the hardest. If you find a shoal, mark the spot, because they often hold in the same area for days.
The kit: feathers and not much else
This is the cheapest fishing there is. A string of mackerel feathers, four to six hooks, each dressed in shiny tinsel or silver to flash in the sun, tied to a weight on the end, is the whole rig. The flash imitates a small shoal of fry, the mackerel charge in, and they hook themselves.
You do not strictly need a rod. A child can fish a feather rig on a simple hand line wound on a frame, dropping it over the side and jigging it up and down, and that is honestly how I would start a young one before letting them loose on a reel. But a cheap telescopic spinning rod and a 4000-size reel make it more fun and teach a transferable skill. The same medium outfit you would use for fishing the Atlantic coast from a small boat handles mackerel feathers without complaint.
Beyond the feathers and a weight (two to four ounces, enough to get the string down through any tide), you want a bucket, a pair of pliers or a disgorger for the hooks, a knife, and a cool box with ice. The pliers matter: a child grabbing a thrashing fish full of small hooks is how the day ends in tears.
How to teach a child to do it
Keep it stupidly simple at first. Drop the feathers to the bottom, wind up a few turns so the weight clears the seabed, then lift and drop the rod tip in a slow rhythm. When the rod loads up and stays heavy, that is fish, and they wind in steadily without stopping.
A few hard-won lessons. Brief them before the fish arrive, because once a shoal hits, the boat is chaos and nobody listens. Manage one rod at a time with small children, because three kids and three feather rigs in a small cockpit becomes a single enormous tangle in about four seconds. And teach the unhooking and dispatching properly from the start, both the practical skill and the respect for the fish, because catching food is a serious thing dressed up as fun.
The legal frame is reassuringly light. Sea fishing for the pot needs no licence in France, and there is no tight bag limit on mackerel of the kind that governs bass, though the principle of taking only what you will eat still applies. The fuller picture is in the visitor guide to a sea fishing licence, but for mackerel you can largely just fish.
Turning a catch into a whole afternoon
The fishing is only half of it. With children, the catch is a way into a much bigger afternoon, and the cruisers who get the most out of it treat the mackerel as a starting point rather than an end.
We have made a small ritual of it. The kids fish the evening shoal, we keep what we will eat and return the rest, and then the catch becomes a cooking job they own: gutting (messy, gory, beloved by eight-year-olds), threading them onto skewers, building the barbecue. A child who has caught, killed, cleaned, and cooked a fish has done something most adults never have, and they know it. It also, quietly, teaches them that food is an animal that was alive, which is a lesson worth more than the supper.
On a wet or fishless day the same kit does other work. A feather rig dropped in a harbour catches small wrasse and pollack the kids can study and release. The tender becomes a fishing platform of its own, paddled into a creek. And the cool box of mackerel, if the shoal was generous, stretches to a second meal: a fish pate, a pan-fry for breakfast, or fillets frozen for a passage when nobody wants to cook. None of this is grand, and that is the point. It fills the hours that a child at anchor would otherwise spend asking when something is going to happen.
Cooking the catch the same hour
Mackerel is at its absolute best within hours of being caught and goes off fast, so cook it the day you land it. Gut them as soon as they are dead, rinse, and chill them on ice; do not let them flap warm in a sunny bucket for an hour, which is the single most common way to ruin them.
The simplest method is the best. Slash the sides, salt them, and grill or barbecue over high heat for three or four minutes a side until the skin crackles and lifts. A squeeze of lemon and bread is all you need. If the kids caught a dozen, the rest fillet easily and freeze, or you pickle them, or you fry them for breakfast. Few things taste as good as a fish your child caught, cooked an hour later in the cockpit while the boat swings to her anchor.
That, really, is the whole appeal. Mackerel turn a quiet evening at anchor into an event, feed the crew for nothing, and teach children something real about where food comes from. Every cruising family should carry a set of feathers. They weigh nothing and they pay for themselves the first time the shoal comes through.
