Well, in my own defense, I was raised as a steelheader, and the phrase that pretty much occupied my waking hours for 20 years was “set hard on the bumps.” What that meant, and still means, of course, is that a steelhead’s soft, rubbery “take” can feel like a lot of different river-bottom items, and when your drift pauses, or you feel anything at all fishy, you come back on that rod immediately with arms, legs, shoulders, and anything else you have handy. If you play pattycake, you’re dead. That’s just the way it is, Bubba.
So when my drift across Possession Bar paused, and my rod tip dipped softly once, twice, and a third time, I took a deep breath, wound up all my particulars, and prepared to make that confrontational sucker down there aware that he had a problem.
“Easy,” said Gary Krein. “Wait ‘til he really takes it.”
I waited, sure, bowing to Krein’s far greater expertise with lingcod. I waited, oh, maybe half a second or so, before I rocked the boat with as huge an upward sweep of the 7-foot Ugly Stik as I could put together.
And I came up against … nothing. Nada. Elvis had cleared the area.
“Impossible,” I said to Krein. “He had it. I could feel it. He should be in the boat right now.”
“Don’t feel badly,” Krein said. “Everybody does it. You have to learn patience when you’re fishing bait for lingcod. I think lings like to chew on it for a while, and turn it around, maybe, before they swallow it. It’s hard to keep from trying to set the hook right away, as you would with salmon.”
So hard, Krein said, that he often puts his rod in a holder when a ling starts fiddling with him, to force himself to wait until line starts peeling off the reel, against the drag. Then he pulls the trigger.
And that’s probably the biggest difference between fishing live bait for lings and working lead-head jigs. Bait will set you against a lot more fish, probably, but you can’t just rip lips, as you would with a jig.
Either way, lings have rebounded strongly over the past dozen years or so in Puget Sound waters, with much shorter seasons and reduced limits largely responsible for the turnaround from a badly overfished condition. Private boaters and charters (Krein owns and operates All Star Charters in Everett) alike are again targeting lingcod during the roughly month and a half the spring season is open in these parts (this one closes June 15), both because of their superior table quality, and their rugged, slam-bang, blue collar fighting tactics as well.
“We’ve had great lingcod fishing around here for probably the past 10 years,” said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist Curt Kraemer, at the Mill Creek regional office. “I like to get out after ‘em a couple of times during the season, at least, and we usually do pretty well.”
Kraemer is a fly fisherman, for a lot of different species, and he has even found a few places where he can take lings on deer hair and feathers.
“Anywhere I can find a rockpile at no deeper than, say, 30 feet, I can often tease a ling into taking a fly,” Kraemer said. “I generally use standard baitfish streamer patterns.”
A bonus for ling anglers, Kraemer said, is that often cabezon, another great table fish, are found in the same area.
We left the Everett Marina at 6 a.m. on our May 11 trip, under lowering black clouds threatening rain from the north. We stopped off the shoreline between Pigeon Creek and Mukilteo to jig for bait, bullheads (sculpin) and/or small flounder, using 2- or 3-inch Point Wilson darts, and leaving for Possession Bar when we had a dozen or so in Krein’s live well.
On the bar we rigged our live bait on 5/0, double hook, salmon mooching setups, leaders cut down to about 2 feet in length. Krein uses heavier 40- or 50-pound test rigs because of the notorious sharpness of lingcod teeth, putting one hook through the lips of a baitfish and the other through the skin just behind the dorsal fin. A swivel and 3- or 4-ounce crescent sinker, between main line and leader, finish the setup. Krein likes the Ugly Stiks in a medium action, which allow a better tussle than do some heavier rods, and he goes with braided line in 30- to 50-pound test.
Big, white or olive, double-tailed rubber jigs with a 3- to 5-ounce lead head, particularly those rigged with a cavity or piece of sponge for scent, also work well on lingcod. The technique is simple simply drop the rig to bottom and reel up a couple of feet, and start jigging. Drop it to bottom regularly, to make sure you’re in contact with “home country.”
The one ling currently allowed, per person, per day, is under a slot limit, and so a “take-home” fish between the minimum length of 26 inches and the maximum of 40 inches can run from roughly 10 pounds to about 24 pounds or so. By the time our trip rolled around this season, Krein had already released several fish substantially larger than the maximum legal size. Our safari netted a fish for each of the three anglers aboard, from 10 pounds, 3 ounces, to 17 pounds, one on a flounder and two on sculpin.
Possession Bar is Krein’s favorite spot, even though the big, mostly sandy, shoal does not appear to be standard, rocky, lingcod habitat. With a good sounder, Krein said, anglers can find the numerous small rockpiles, dropoffs, and holes falling 5 to 15 feet below the generally flat, surrounding surface of the bar, in 60 to 90 feet of water.
“Most of those hold a fish or two,” he said.
Another very good spot is the artificial “reef,” composed of a deliberately sunken ferry, lying about 500 yards due west of the green Possession Point buoy. It holds a lot of fish, but is also a tackle grabber. You can’t let a jig bounce across the structure here, Krein said, and expect to keep your gear. Small boats can launch at the south Whidbey ramp, on the east side of Possession Point, just north of the “Bait Box” and only a mile from the Possession buoy.
There’s another artificial reef off the south end of Hat Island, not as good as the Possession Point structure, and other ling producing areas off the Edmonds Marina, Onomac and Rocky points on Camano Island, off Camano Head, and off the northeast corner of Hat Island.
John Martinis, owner of John’s Sporting Goods on North Broadway in Everett, recommends two drifts on either side of Admiralty Inlet, in 60 to 90 feet of water. One starts just east of the Foulweather Bluff buoy and runs due south for a half mile or so, while the other lies along the dropoff “inside” Double Bluff, from just south of the point easterly toward Useless Bay.
Bob Ferber at Holiday Market Sports in Burlington said there’s a lot of great ling fishing in the Deception Pass area, on the edges of the pass itself, around Burrows Island and Alan Island, both sides of Biz Point, and a lot of other spots in the general area. There are small-boat launches in Deception Pass State Park, on the west side of the pass at Cranberry Lake, and on the east side in Cornet Bay, but be very, very careful of the tides.
Krein made one final point: while a slack tide, or a tide with a minimal water displacement, might make it easier to get to the bottom and thus fish lings, particularly in certain areas, he’s convinced a running tide (which would naturally push bait past a ling’s lair faster) makes them bite more aggressively. Our trip tended to prove that theory. Several fish played with us when we first arrived on the bar, but it was only after the tide began to run that the real catching started.
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