Yelloweye?

Is this a red vermilion rockfish

  • Yes

    Votes: 7 10.3%
  • No

    Votes: 61 89.7%

  • Total voters
    68
I just descend the "orangy" ones back down. If we want to eat a "cod" we keep a bigger black one like in the pic.

HM
Me too. There's plenty of other color rockfish to be caught and the possibility of being wrong doesn't exceed the value of any one fish.
 
All the large Vermilion I've ever caught has a white eye.

Very interesting. I looked back at some pics of a Large Vermilion I caught & the eyes where white also. However the avg size were red...
 
Here was my Vermillion last time out and they are a lot darker red in my experience.
 

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Vermillion are a lot more darker red than Yelloweye, and do not have YELLOW EYES. The one in the instagram picture is most definitely a yelloweye, and if that was from a charter that is kind of a shame.
 
Non Yellow Eye is filled with worms usually.


Very true. I kept a jumbo vermilion this year & when i cut it open it was discusting. Just packed with worms..
 
Guides should know better.
How much you wanna bet he’d be the guy slandering the new sports fisherman taking a picture with his once in a lifetime tyee before releasing it as well?
 
Looks like vermilion on the left and canary on the right. Top picture sure looks like a yelloweye to me.
Agreed

In over a decade guiding in the Gwaii I’ve also never seen a vermillion anywhere close to 24#’s
 
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At first glance it looked like a yelloweye to me, but now I'm not so sure. Definitely has some mottled gray patches and while the one pectoral fin looks to have a black edge, the other fins don't look to have them. Tough to see if the anal fin is rounded and tail square with an indent (Vermillion). Also tough not being there and trying to pass judgement from a photo as lighting and filters can change perceptions. If it is a 21 lb Vermillion, it would suggest it is quite old and old rockfish can look quite different from young / "middle age" fish. I'm not quite ready to break to the pitchforks out yet.

I keep a copy of the Washington rockfish ID chart on my dash when we are bottom fishing (https://www.recfin.org/resources/fi...of-washington-oregon-and-northern-california/).

We just got back from a trip to the Central Coast. One day after bottom fishing I had just finish laying the fish on the deck for a photo with the gaff; we had a couple good size lingcod 25 lbs - 30 lbs and two vermillions, which there was no doubt what they were. There was group off a yacht walking by when one lady decides she's going to show off two her friends and pipes up "you know, those lingcod are breeding females and those are yelloweye rockfish, so you better not let the DFO catch you because they are illegal." First thought was "holy ****, she does realize I'm still holding this sharp, pointed implement in my hand right?!". After I took a breath, I calmly explained that they were actually vermillion rockfish and how they differed from yelloweye, and that we released all the yelloweye we caught using a Seaqualizer to minimize the risk of barotrauma. She turned her nose up in the air and huffed off before I could tell her that one lingcod had been hooked deep and wouldn't have made if we tried to release it and one was my friend's who joined us for a few days and was the first lingcod they ever caught and wanted to keep - and that we released some larger ones.

Left a very bad taste in my mouth and had me upset for a few days as I did not appreciate having to defend myself. We plan all year to go someplace new to explore and see new country. Yes we fished a lot, but we release far more than we keep. A couple days before my wife released a 35 - 37 lb spring (41" x 26") and she released an even bigger one (40" x 27") a couple days later (we kept coho and springs under 25 lbs).

Rant over, sorry for the derail...

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Why should you feel bad retaining legal fish?

There is some wisdom in Haig Browns works that goes as: "I hope that one day it will not be a matter of pride to keep a limit of fish"...or something like that.

We should all strive to know enough that we recognize what constitutes a conservation concern. Relying on regulations when we know better would be wrong. But in the same token, if you were doing nothing wrong, why should you feel bad?
 
With all the lodges that run self guided boats there’s more yellow eyes hitting the docks than one might think unfortunately thinking they’re Vermillion. Years ago(when retaining YE was legal) used to have the odd self guided boat hit the dock with big smiles because they had a locker full of Boccaccio’s thinking they were YE’s. o_O
 
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