There is a very complicated set of rules governing bottomfish in WA. But essentially, it boils down to this:
You can only go bottomfishing freely (it’s the ‘freely’ part that is complicated) on days when Halibut are open, and the Halibut season in WA is only 4 days long.
So even though I really prefer Lingcod to Halibut, there are only so many chances in a year to get any Ling, so you have to kind of strike when the iron is hot.
We sailed out of La Push at 6am or so, and were dutifully at the Halibut grounds around 8. There were lots of boats there, and plenty of happy reports of Halibut catches, but we didn’t get so much as a nibble. Around noon, we gave up on Halibut, ate lunch while we drove to The Secret And Not Mentioned Lingcod Area, and, once we got there, we started fishing for Ling.
I have no idea how many Lingcod live in that area, but both times I’ve been there, we’ve limited out in under an hour. We pulled so many fish off the bottom that we were turning away the “oh that’s just a medium size” ones. Here’s one of my two:
This guy was 41″ long and weighed about 21#.
We thought about heading back for the afternoon Halibut bite, but decided to head in. A pod of porpoises played in our wake for awhile, which was a lot of fun.
When we got the four fish all cleaned and filleted, we ended up with 23# of cod meat. That’s a pretty good day out on the water.
The other Halibut open day was too stormy to go out, so that’s the 2013 Lingcod haul. w00t!