Fishing the Bottom

I have been content with jumping into the skiff, running 5 minutes, and catching cobia. There are a tremendous number of small cobia in the bay with enough larger fish around to keep things interesting. But, some of the guys wanted a change of pace and to do the offshore bottom fishing thing. So, offshore we ran yesterday.

It was ridiculously calm and the Healthy Grin still remembered her way out there. The radio chatter through the day indicated a very slow tuna bite with the best of it being around the Washington Canyon. Near the Norfolk Canyon, dolphin fishing was good and a good number of both white and blue marlin were caught.

Bottom fishing was good. We caught 20 intact golden tilefish. We had others sharked. There was a mako that hung out behind the boat for a while. It wasn’t big enough to keep so we did not try to catch it. Our largest golden that we almost caught was taken by a hammerhead. We did catch the hammerhead as it left us no choice.

Some of the guys had never caught blackbelly rosefish. I said we can catch as many of those as you want to crank. An argument against electric reels….conservation. Hand-cranking these creatures greatly limits how many times you want to drop that bait down there. They got tired of that rather quickly. Every drop resulted in every hook catching a rosefish. Stan Simmerman caught 2 on a single hook.

Without really fishing for them, we ended up with a limit of blueline tilefish. We also caught a snowy grouper and a wreckfish.

While fishing for goldens, Johnny Boyd set the hook on one and lost hold of his new deep-drop rod. The water was very clear and we got to watch that fishing pole sink for a long time. Johnny was trying to figure out how he was going to explain to his wife why he had to buy a whole new set up when a few drifts later, Johnny catches a golden tilefish on his old backup rod. Also hooked was some fishing line. He had managed to find his rod 700 feet down on the bottom. We were able to hand line it up and got his whole set-up back including the fancy lights he had on his bottom rig (fish was no longer on it), making this the best catch of the day.