Fishing for bottom fish out of Sekiu in May is an incredible experience every Washington angler should have. Ling cod, Cabazon, Rockfish, Seabass, and Halibut are all on the menu.
Okay Okay, I’m super late and behind on posting this story of our trip to Sekiu for bottom fishing and camping. I took this volunteer job that’s been consuming so much time in my schedule and is impacting my outdoor recreational activities and the associated writing about them.
I did want to get this out there though, cause this was a seriously awesome time and many of the lessons that determined how we did on this trip will carry through the summer, even after some seasons close on Jun 15th.
The impetus for this trip to the Olympic Peninsula was we were going nuts being stuck at home on lockdown for much of the spring and just itching to go camping. My wife told me “I don’t care where you take me, I will go to the dumpiest fishiest place to camp, just take get me out of the house”.
Me: …
So we went to Sekiu!
Okay, that’s not quite fair, Sekiu is quaint and nice, and…Look, Sekiu is a fish town, first and foremost. It’s a great destination if you love to fish.
So when we arrived at the gravel parking lot of Mason’s to check in and saw the tents set up adjacent to the parking lot, my family was just grateful to go camping and get out of the house, right? Nope! I almost had a mutiny on my hands.
How could you take us camping to a gravel parking lot?!
My wife of course forgot all about her previous “I don’t care where you take me” thing. I tried to keep them calm while I worked out where we were actually camping. It turned out there was another lot on the south end of town that had a nice green belt where we could pitch our tent, right on the edge of Clallam Bay. Mutiny averted.
You can continue reading about our adventure or checkout the short video below (or both!)
The following morning (Saturday, no Hali fishing), we decided to head out early and try our hand at getting some black rockfish and ling cod.
We headed west a few miles to a reef that was on our charts and still within Marine Area 5. We dropped some Berkley Saltwater Glup penny-colored plastics on 1 oz jig heads down in 40 ft of water and immediately hooked up on a nice rockfish we quickly released.
We continued to drift west at about 1 knot towards the reef. We picked up maybe 1 more rockfish, but the current made it nearly impossible to stay vertical. As I dug through my box, I realized I had either 1 oz jigheads or like 8 oz…I needed 2 oz jigheads!
I had some 2 oz dart-like jigs that helped us stay a bit more vertical but not as effective as the plastics.
I was also using about a 6 oz banana mooching style sinker and mooching a blue label whole herring on a 30″ leader near the bottom, searching for a big ling to grab ahold of. For even more information and ideas about fishing for lingcod at Sekiu, head to our page on the topic.
Based on the timeframe, the current should have been slowing down, and it probably was about to enter that much better slack tide type of current, but we had to jet back to camp as we had promised to do a big breakfast back at camp after we came back from early morning fishing.
Breakfast took way longer than we expected and we didn’t get back on the water until the afternoon.
Of course, a nice NW wind started to blow at about 15 knots, making it even more difficult to stay vertical. We caught several barely undersized lings before calling it a day and returning back to the docks empty-handed. You know, when everyone talks about the nice day on the water you had.
The next day we did better
The next day was Sunday, and that meant Halibut was open.
We decided we would not rush out, but instead take our time, have a nice breakfast, and then fish the crap out of the day until we ran out of fishable water or were limited on everything.
I cannot tell you how much it hurt my soul watching every boat empty from the docks, boat launch, and seemingly from all over to head west or east of Clallam Bay while I ate my wonderful campfire-cooked bacon and eggs.
We finally left the nearly empty docks at Mason’s Olsen Resort and headed west back to the reef we became familiar with.
As it turned out, we hit the slack tide current just perfectly. We immediately started picking up fish after fish (Oh yeah, I also bought 2 oz jig heads for the plastics!). You know, the kind of fish catching, net flying, kind of action that requires you to shed a layer of clothing.
I will say the other thing we did much better on this day was boat control.
I used my Navionics app on my phone to keep a close track of how we were drifting to set it up to over the best spot around the reef. If I saw we weren’t headed the right way, we reeled up and got set up again.
We continued to C&R rockfish while putting the odd sea bass on the boat. And then I hooked into something with some real weight on the mooching setup.
After an intense struggle, we brought a hefty 9 lb Cabazon onto the boat. We continued to add sea bass to our scorecard and released some undersized lings.
We did give the Halibut thing a shot for about an hour before we looked at each other and realized we would have much more fun chasing lings up in the rocks than dragging lead for a super low probability halibut.
I won’t say exactly where we ended up, but…we found some rocky terrain that had who knows how many big lings.
We got one 26″ ling on the plastics and then a 30″ ling on a horse herring (halibut bait) within about 30 minutes of each other.
It was at this point we decided to head back, pack it up (literally pack up our campsite), and call it a day.
Overall, we had a great weekend of camping and fishing in Sekiu, one of the best fishing destinations in Washington State.
Check out my page devoted to lingcod fishing in Washington for the most updated lingcod fishing techniques.