Sharphooks
Well-Known Member
I made it back into Laredo and decided to fish the first point I came to if for no other reason then to stay out of the commercial shipping lanes in the fog.... a lot of the southbound Alaska barge traffic uses Laredo so dwaddling in thick fog was low on my list
So I found a promising looking point with a hook of rock to it which for me means a catcher mitt for bait. The sonar confirmed the bait part of it and I got a break in the fog
A nice bait ball at 150. I’d been catching my bigger fish deep this trip: 85 - 130 . My weapon of choice had been a single anchovy....no flasher...no nothing....either in a Rhys Davis helmet or pinned with a tooth pick. That was a deadly combo for me the entire trip. I dropped this down to 135 feet just skimming the top of that bait ball on the peak of the rock cliff. Massive take-down. Instant. It was a mid-twenty spring. I rigged up again, dropped it back down again. Another mid twenty spring. How often does that happen in a completely new spot you’ve never fished before?
However, there is a definite downside to fishing out of the way places that rarely (if ever) get fished: Huge amounts of rockfish. If you’re a bait guy and want to do “the right thing” with the baro-trauma device it takes a serious chunk out of your fishing time to get the red ones back down to their accustomed depth so they can live to tell the tale (as opposed to being lazy, letting them float, then watching them get picked off by an eagle which happens 95% of the time you leave a floater behind the boat for longer then a minute)
My off-the-shelf baro-trauma device I found useless this trip.....the fish kept falling off. So I rigged up my own device with halibut gangion:
Once I got the hook into the rockfish’ s jaw and lowered him gently by hand into the water, I hooked the top loop into my downrigger clip and used the weight of the cannonball to get it back down to its preferred depth
Here’s one of the rockfish set up for the descent:
Here’s the screen shot of him going back down to his natural habitat:
Here’s the screen shot during retrieval with visual evidence the fish popped off the hook. Success!
Once the fog cleared I got back to the other side of Swindle Island and decided to go to one of my favorite lighthouses. I hadn’t been there in 5 years, for several reasons....probably the biggest reason was an extremely unpleasant and persistent memory of getting caught in a SE blow in a much smaller boat on the way to that place.
And getting my arse handed to me due to a bad Nav decision—-wrong place, wrong time. At the time there was little doubt in my mind that both my dog (who was a 3 month old puppy at the time) and I would not make it through that storm. Not a panic, just a dawning realization that the boat was the wrong tool for the job; a twenty foot single outboard boat getting tossed around in 4-5 meter spiky mountains of snot-green water studded with fronds of bull kelp and tree trunks. I already knew that one frond of kelp wrapped around the cooling water ports of my single Honda would kill my power and that would be it. All the while, we were free-dropping off the peaks of huge waves, the period so short that it was like being in a cauldron of boiling water. Just a matter of time before I lost the wheelhouse glass. To this day I have PTSD every time I see big curling breakers in sporty wind.
But we made it to that place and it sure was good to be back. No other boats, no wind, gorgeous sunrise and a day full of promise.....OMG
So I found a promising looking point with a hook of rock to it which for me means a catcher mitt for bait. The sonar confirmed the bait part of it and I got a break in the fog
A nice bait ball at 150. I’d been catching my bigger fish deep this trip: 85 - 130 . My weapon of choice had been a single anchovy....no flasher...no nothing....either in a Rhys Davis helmet or pinned with a tooth pick. That was a deadly combo for me the entire trip. I dropped this down to 135 feet just skimming the top of that bait ball on the peak of the rock cliff. Massive take-down. Instant. It was a mid-twenty spring. I rigged up again, dropped it back down again. Another mid twenty spring. How often does that happen in a completely new spot you’ve never fished before?
However, there is a definite downside to fishing out of the way places that rarely (if ever) get fished: Huge amounts of rockfish. If you’re a bait guy and want to do “the right thing” with the baro-trauma device it takes a serious chunk out of your fishing time to get the red ones back down to their accustomed depth so they can live to tell the tale (as opposed to being lazy, letting them float, then watching them get picked off by an eagle which happens 95% of the time you leave a floater behind the boat for longer then a minute)
My off-the-shelf baro-trauma device I found useless this trip.....the fish kept falling off. So I rigged up my own device with halibut gangion:
Once I got the hook into the rockfish’ s jaw and lowered him gently by hand into the water, I hooked the top loop into my downrigger clip and used the weight of the cannonball to get it back down to its preferred depth
Here’s one of the rockfish set up for the descent:
Here’s the screen shot of him going back down to his natural habitat:
Here’s the screen shot during retrieval with visual evidence the fish popped off the hook. Success!
Once the fog cleared I got back to the other side of Swindle Island and decided to go to one of my favorite lighthouses. I hadn’t been there in 5 years, for several reasons....probably the biggest reason was an extremely unpleasant and persistent memory of getting caught in a SE blow in a much smaller boat on the way to that place.
And getting my arse handed to me due to a bad Nav decision—-wrong place, wrong time. At the time there was little doubt in my mind that both my dog (who was a 3 month old puppy at the time) and I would not make it through that storm. Not a panic, just a dawning realization that the boat was the wrong tool for the job; a twenty foot single outboard boat getting tossed around in 4-5 meter spiky mountains of snot-green water studded with fronds of bull kelp and tree trunks. I already knew that one frond of kelp wrapped around the cooling water ports of my single Honda would kill my power and that would be it. All the while, we were free-dropping off the peaks of huge waves, the period so short that it was like being in a cauldron of boiling water. Just a matter of time before I lost the wheelhouse glass. To this day I have PTSD every time I see big curling breakers in sporty wind.
But we made it to that place and it sure was good to be back. No other boats, no wind, gorgeous sunrise and a day full of promise.....OMG
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. You're inspiring me!
