First Halibut of 2020

With the dwindling salmon fishery, thank you WDFW and ODFW, we are looking to other fisheries to keep fish in the freezer. I recently got invited to buddy boat to halibut grounds out of Garibaldi. Since our springer season was pretty much a bust due to the pandemic, we accepted the invite.

The plan was to launch at 5am and get an early start. Apparently, the Port of Garibaldi has some pretty messed up scheduling and launch rules that caused us to scramble for a transient mooring the night before. They do not even open the ramp for launching till 6am. WTF!!! Also, due to the pandemic, they only have one lane on each side open which caused a huge backup when they did finally open. Needless to say, I will probably not be taking my boat to launch out of Garibaldi very often.

Anyway, even with the overnight mooring, we did not quite get out at 5am. We did manage to leave the dock shortly after 5:30am with plans to follow another boat out to their numbers. It was max ebb at the jaws and the crossing was pretty rough, but we had no problem getting out. Once out in the ocean, it was not quite as smooth as we had hoped. My buddy boat could not quite keep up with the other boat we had planned to follow out to their secret spot and had to call off the chase. Fortunately, my buddy boat had their own set of numbers as a backup and we started our very rough trek out.

Two hours and twenty minutes later, we arrived. We had to make one stop on the way to allow for a little chumming. One of my mates did not get quite enough sleep the night before. 🙂 We baited up and dropped our lines. As this was my first halibut trip, I really had no idea what to expect. It took almost 5 minutes to drop the line to depth. It felt like forever. Within 3 minutes of bouncing the bottom, we had a double hookup. We were extremely fortunate to have a great friend that let us use two of his brand new electric reels. I am not sure we would have had as much fun without them. Even with the electric reels, it took more than 15 minutes to reel the fish in with the occasional tugs and runs. My friend on the other reel got his up first. It was a pretty large rock fish. To the cooler it went. Mine got to the surface a few minutes later and low and behold, it was a halibut. WOW, this halibut fishing is easy. 🙂 We continued to hookup within minutes of bouncing the bottom for about another 2 hours before the bite turned off. Unfortunately, we only landed the one halibut. Better to be lucky than good sometimes.

With the one halibut per person per trip and only six halibut per year, this could be a very expensive fishery, especially of you happen to not land a halibut on any one trip. As expensive as it may be, I could see us continuing to make halibut runs from time to time.