The Ocean / WA Coast opens up for rockfish and lingcod fishing in the 2nd weekend of March and I plan to be ready for it!
Look, things are a bit slow in the old Puget Sound area right now…yeah you can head south to try and get some steelhead, but if you’re hanging out up this way, you are just kind of waiting for MA10 to re-open up and getting ready for ocean bottom fishing season off the coast of Washington.
With all of our fisheries, unless you’ve been doing them for years, it’s easy to forget all of the details…and with all the supply chain stuff, you don’t want to be caught in the last minute trying to buy tackle from empty shelves and pegs and settling for some lesser option because the good stuff is all gone.
Traditionally, I would approach this fishery as a primarily jig and plastics game. Towards the end of last year, I found some much better ways to approach catching rockfish and stacking a limit as fast as possible. As fun as rockfish are to catch, who wants to spend hours grinding them out? Let’s get the limit as fast as possible and then chase big lings, yes?
There’s a lot to be said about angling for rockfish, but I’m going to focus this blog post purely on tackle prep. Let’s move on from tying on jigs and move to a setup that is more common with surf fishing and fishing from the beach.
While I have my own YT channel, I like to embed other videos at times that I think will be helpful to you all, and this one from Salt Strong was very helpful.
Yes, this is for beach fishing, but this is my new favorite approach to catching rockfish.
Tie the above rig according to the video exactly. Use the appropriate-sized cannonball on the bottom end based on depth and current. I put a Berkeley gulp plastic on the bottom hook and a shrimp fly/ace high fly JR on the top rig.
I think I lose less tackle this way as the cannonball seems to hangup less than the jig heads.
If you are going fishing with me this spring…tie some of the above rigs and bring them along.
Now that we’ve limited on rockfish, let’s go get those big lings!
Here’s a link to my new guide to lingcod fishing in Washington which has more information too.
There are two primary ways I target lings: First, is jigging larger jigs like the Lancer jigs (which are awesome), and second, one of my favorites is mooching blue-black label herring.
You will pick up the odd cabezon while mooching herring as well. The cat-and-mouse game of figuring out when a ling actually has committed to the herring can be fun and at times frustrating.
For mooching herring, the setup is pretty simple. I like to tie 7/0 and 5/0 or 5/0 3/0 combinations of front vs trailer hooks with 50 lb test line. I use Gamakatsu big river bait hooks as I’m usually drifting and the lings don’t have a ton of time to munch the bait. I can usually hook them by slowly reeling after they bite and within a few seconds especially if the rod really loads up, reel faster to set the hook.
You don’t usually have to swing for the fences, but some people cannot resist and they’ve still hooked fish on my boat so…there’s not just one way to do it.
I usually tie the above mooching rigs with a snell knot on the smaller trailer hook and a bait loop knot on the lead larger hook. I like a lot of spacing (like 6-8 inches) between both hooks, even if it means there’s a loop protruding from the rig after I attach it to a blue-label herring.
I’m planning to hit Marine Area 4 and 2 throughout March and into May. Drop me a comment if you have any questions. Good luck!
