The Faial–Pico channel
Sound or strait · Salt water · in The Azores
The eight-kilometre passage between Faial and Pico, deep the whole way across with steep island flanks on both sides and the water of the open Atlantic running through it.
Safety: boat safety — can cause serious injury or death. One more point applies here.
FishingHQ describes what this place is, not whether you may fish it. Access, permits and who to ask.
What you can catch here
Documented at this place, grouped by how you would be fishing, with how strongly the sources support each one. This is what has been written down, not a forecast, and being listed is never permission to fish.
From a boat · 3
What these strengths mean
- Established quarry
- Fishing sources describe this as a normal local target here, not merely as caught.
- Repeatedly reported
- Several independent public accounts. Enough to say it happens more than once; not enough to call it a fishery.
- Recorded here
- At least one credible public account of this species being caught here. That is all it means.
- Places, accounts and sources are counted separately
- A fish documented once at each of six marks is still documented once at each of six marks. Breadth is reported as a place count and never raises the strength, and sources are deduplicated across places so one publisher covering a whole coast counts as one. A fishery account is a source describing the fishing; a recorded catch is a report of a specific catch. They are counted apart because they are not the same evidence.
How people fish it
Practised here: Sea fishing.
Methods the sources name for this ground. Each one is explained in full on its own page.
The ground and the water
- The ground
- The eight-kilometre passage between Faial and Pico, deep the whole way across with steep island flanks on both sides and the water of the open Atlantic running through it.
- Exposure
- A deep channel between two steep islands in open ocean, and the wind funnels along it rather than across.
- Depth
- Deep for its whole width, with the island flanks falling away steeply rather than shelving — which is what makes it pelagic ground rather than a strait to cross.
Through the year
The pelagic fishing here is given as a June to September proposition, and the geometry of the passage rather than the islands is what concentrates it.
The months the sources attach to each species here. Where a species carries no season it is listed underneath rather than assumed to run through the year.
| Species | J | F | M | A | M | J | J | A | S | O | N | D |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atlantic bonito — established quarry, recorded in June, July, August, September. | ||||||||||||
| Yellowfin tuna — repeatedly reported, recorded in June, July, August, September. | ||||||||||||
| Mahi-mahi — recorded here, recorded in June, July, August, September. |
Safety
Boat safety — Can cause serious injury or death
The banks and seamounts that produce the fishing are open-ocean ground far from shelter, sometimes with the nearest alternative harbour on a different island, and Atlantic conditions can deteriorate faster than a small craft can cross that distance.
What reduces it: Treat a seamount trip as offshore passage-making rather than as a fishing outing. Go in a boat and with people equipped for it, set a turn-round decision on the forecast before leaving, and carry the means to call for help from beyond VHF range of land.
Cliffs and rock platforms — Can cause serious injury or death
Swell reaches the islands from any direction with no shelf to dissipate it, so waves at exposed lava platforms are larger and less regular than the wind suggests and arrive in sets rather than steadily.
What reduces it: Check swell rather than wind and check its direction. Watch a platform for a sustained period before committing to it, and never fish a position you could not leave immediately.
Rules and access
FishingHQ does not know the current access position here. The Azores are an autonomous region of Portugal administering their own fisheries, and recreational sea and underwater fishing are licensed regionally. The archipelago also carries an unusually dense network of marine protected areas and seamount closures whose boundaries are not visible from a boat. Measures change. Check the current position with the regional fisheries directorate before going.
Particular to this water: This is open-ocean ground inside an archipelago carrying a dense network of marine protected areas and seamount closures. Their boundaries are lines on a chart and are not visible from a boat, so knowing where you are here is a regulatory question as well as a navigational one. Establish the current boundaries with the regional fisheries directorate before fishing.
Who holds the answer:
- The Regional Directorate for Fisheries of the Azores, which licenses recreational sea and underwater fishing across the archipelago.
- The regional maritime authority, for protected areas and local measures.
- The Regional Directorate for Fisheries of the Azores, for recreational licences and the rules on sizes, species and gear
- The managing authorities of the archipelago's marine protected areas and seamount closures, whose boundaries govern what may be done inside them
- The regional environment authority, for the crater lakes and the protected landscapes containing them
- Charter skippers and dive centres, for current practice and for where the closure boundaries actually run
Sources for this place
- JNCC species and habitat conservation advice — Joint Nature Conservation Committee (Conservation authority)Relied on for: Description, designation and habitat characterisation of the named coastal and marine features of the United Kingdom, and the species characteristically associated with them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Cefas science, advice and data on marine and freshwater environments — Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Government fisheries body)Relied on for: Marine environmental science for UK shelf seas: sediment characterisation, estuarine process, shellfish bed distribution, tidal range and the monitoring that describes them.States this directlyCitation checked — the work exists and is described correctly
- Fishing Madeira, and jigging and popping the Azores islands — GT Fishing (Practitioner report)Relied on for: That the named Azorean islands, banks and seamounts are fished for the species given, by the technique and at the depths recorded, and the summer season the operator attaches to them.FishingHQ's interpretation of what it saysPassage read and verified
How FishingHQ labels evidence is explained in the evidence policy. Last reviewed 2026-08-16.