Halibut Fishing 2016

Steve and Adam baiting squid on 16/0 circle hooks

Adam unhooking a hook from the ground line. It's always fun to see what's coming up

 Un-hooking a big skate

 Measuring the fish. The tidebook gives estimated  weights according to length

  Years ago I prayed for patience, and God in all His wisdom gave me what I wanted, or at least orchestrated the circumstances so that my prayer could be answered. I had seven children, I became a commercial fisherman, and I subscribe to Hughes Net. Waiting for the pictures to download is an exercise that could try even the patience of Job. I swear, if there were a contest between a sloth and Hughes Net, the sloth would win. Actually I'm surprised that I can even get on the internet. For the better part of a week I've been unable to. Oh well, patience my son, patience.
 Last week I went out halibut fishing in an effort to catch my commercial quota. I needed 1564 lbs and I wanted to get it done before the salmon start to run good and before my crew had to go back to school to teach.  I took Adam Gretsinger who has helped me for a few years now, and Steve Barry, another teacher who wanted to try his hand at commercial fishing. It took us three days from start to finish, but we got our quota and even a little extra. The first day I made a small fifty hook set in a spot that I hadn't tried before, but I wanted to expand my horizons, and I also wanted Steve to see what we would be doing. We made two longer sets and came  back and pulled the small one after a three hour soak. It had several salable halibut plus one that weighed 129 lbs. Unfortunately that was the only really nice fish we caught on that trip. As it was, it tangled the line and we spent over an hour trying to straighten out the mess. Fortunately the wind wasn't blowing too bad, so we could work on it without too much problem. We were encouraged by the big fish so we set more hooks in the same area. When we pulled it the next day the sand fleas had taken most of the bait, leaving us with bare hooks. There were two snaps side by side that were bent all out of shape, and a short ways down the line a huge sculpin or bullhead or double ugly was on the line; or his head was anyway. Something big had come up and sucked the body right off the hook, leaving just the head and a few guts dangling. I like to think it was a huge halibut, but I'll never know.  We lost a lot of bait to sand fleas on one of the other sets as well and didn't catch many sculpins or greycod to replace the bait, so we had to go in and buy three boxes of squid so we could re-bait. For the most part the weather was good, at least where we were fishing, not too much wind, although we were fishing during big tides-18ft plus. When you get the big tides, as I've mentioned before, you get a lot of current moving, as the tides are going in and out the bay, like filling and draining a bathtub. We didn't get any eels this time, but we did catch a few skates. They look a lot like a sting ray, but without the poisonous barb. They have beautiful eyes, green or yellow, and square lips which are located right on the bottom of their heads. I guess it helps with scooping up stuff from the bottom. I suppose that between the skates, halibut, grey cod, rockfish and sandfleas, the bottom must stay pretty clean. I'd love to have a submarine and go down for a look around. On one set we snagged a huge coral tree and broke the ground line. That's always a hassle.  We were able to go to the other end of the set and grab the bouy and get the remainder of the line back. The commercial Dungeness crab fishery is still going on, so I couldn't really go to all the areas I wanted to because certain spots were littered with crab pots, but in the end it didn't matter. We caught 1660 lbs of halibut, 96 pounds more than I needed, but the International Pacific Halibut Commission will subtract that from my quota next year, so it all comes out in the wash. The price was good, everyone made money and I'm free to go about my salmon fishing without having to think about the halibut now. All in all, 2016 has treated me pretty good.  I hope that you can say the same at year's end.