I missed posting last evening because I was frying fish at an impromptu fish fry at Gage's new house. Sorry, but those fresh chilipepper rockfish filets were sooooo good. Gage took a couple of buddies out to "end of the world" (where the continental shelf falls off) on Wednesday and they caught limits of chilipepper rockfish fairly quickly once they found the fish in 450 feet of water. Here's the photo:

   Gage is still smiling because he hasn't started cleaning their 30 fish. His smile dwindled a bit yesterday after we returned from Rittenburg with thirty rockfish, one sixteen pound lingcod, and nineteen petrale sole (to five pounds). We'd never caught petrale sole before, but after just eating some for dinner, damn.... Petrales are on notice. Watch out. They taste gooood. For the record, and for any wardens monitoring this, Gage gave his Wednesday chilipepper filets to his mother on Wednesday, freeing him up to catch these fish on Thursday:

   He didn't catch all of them. Ed Parsons and I helped. The petrales and a few sanddabs were caught about five miles short of Rittenburg in 350ish feet of water. The sole were biting so well we almost skipped going rockfishing, and after eating a few I may skip the rockcod next time. But probably not. We stuck to south end of the reef and only caught the one ling, but the schools of yellowtail and widows peaked up to only 150 feet down. No problems with yelloweyes until we tried to concentrate on catching lings. Then they swarmed. The downrigger and Seaqualizer worked well to get them back down. I'm not sure if the fish lived after, but they didn't die where I could see them, and that's the American way of dying, so good enough for me. We counted 42 boats on Rittenburg including us. Other guys tried different locations in order to beat the crowd. A report from one of them: "

Hey Willie,

Finally got a shot at the deep water rockfish Thursday taking advantage of a beautiful day on the ocean.  We ran to a secret spot about 30 miles SW of Bodega Head fishing in 300' of water.  Turns out about 20 other boats were in on the secret.  Reports had been good for lingcod so I started out with a 12 ounce jig head and 10" glow scampi tail.  My friend Craig put on large speed iron and had three nice size rockies in the boat in short order.  Not having a bit on the jig in 15 minutes I was about to reel up to switch to iron when my rod bent over.  There was no apparent strike, just looked like bottom.  I pulled back and there was no give so I reeled down to give it a snap to free it up when I felt the head shakes.  It was now game on with a major tug-of-war for the next 20 minutes.  Imagine our surprise when instead of a big ling appearing under the boat this big halibut shows up.  Craig did a great job of getting a gaff in it and we both hauled it over the side.  Not a bad start to the morning.  We did not manage to fill out our limits of pacific halibut, but we did find plenty of lings and quality rockfish for limits of both.  The lings ranged in size from 15 to 27 pounds and the halibut weighed 45 pounds.  I'm sorry I can't tell you my secret spot, because if there were 20+ boats there on a weekday I can only imagine what it will look like on a weekend.

Regards,

Brad Stompe

Battleship grey Grady 228 (Mary Frances)

"  There were quite a few guys looking for those Pacific halibut yesterday. Nice fricking job, Brad. I'd say more nice things, but bitter jealousy prevents it from happening. Damn.

   Photo evidence that the surfperch are biting. Stripers? Well, let's talk about the perch. Sand crabs, prawns, and Berkley Gulp! Sandworms have been the best baits, but these were caught on a 1 1/4 ounce Stingsilver chrome jig. Bait generally catches more but the artificials are more satisfying. Crabbing has been mostly poor for Dungeness but a witnessed a spot of hope from the outer bay yesterday. I don't know where from out there, but somebody found limits of some nice crab.