Rockfishing still good; coho season starts off slowly

Helen and Ed Astell from Central Point take up residence in Brookings for two months out of the year to escape the valley heat and nail some nice rockfish and lingcod out of the Port of Brookings Harbor. The Pilot/Larry Ellis

Last week anglers were able to find some very cooperative rockfish, lingcod and cabbies uphill, downhill and both ways from the middle. It’s fairly safe to say that limits of the bottom-grabbers were pretty much the rule.

Electric fillet knives are definitely starting to take over the fillet station. There were at least a half dozen brands of these contraptions well represented, names like American Angler, Rapala and Cabela being only a few.

You can dish out $40 for one of the fancier models, but no matter how much you spend on an electric knife, all blades will eventually wear out.

The dulling of a blade insidiously creeps up on everyone using these things. When you have to expend too much effort to push through a fillet, it’s time to replace the blade.

Replacement blades are often offered by the manufacturer, with prices ranging from $9.95 to $19.95. Some brands don’t offer replacement blades at all.

At the end of the day last Wednesday there was a guy using a knife that zipped through the fillets like going through hot butter. He was using a Black & Decker, the one you can buy almost anywhere for $9.95, what the price of a replacement blade would cost.

COHO

Quite a few anglers did their best to find a few silvers on the first few days of the opener and on Wednesday. According to one of the fish checkers, most of the coho were about six miles out, off of Bird Island, but most of the fish had all their fins. I saw one hatchery fish come to the tables on Wednesday.

But it won’t be too long before fishermen will be slaying the fatted silver. All it’s going to take is a little cooperation from Mother Nature.

Winchester Bay led the pack with anglers retaining an average of 1.59 coho. That leads to the next question. How does a person catch six-tenths of a silver?

Well you can’t. The fish checkers just divide the amount of anglers who fished into the amount of coho that were harvested, which was 582 for the first two days outside of the Umpqua’s jaws.

That means that many boats limited out on the silvers while others got the proverbial goose egg. However, there were an additional 1,110 wild coho that were released, plus 12 Chinook, so all-in-all Winchester Bay anglers had a few thrills on the opener, even if they had to end up releasing the fish.

The Chinook that were caught and released, I heard, were in the 20-pound category, and there were a lot of silvers in the ocean that were in the 12-pound class, very large fish this early in the season.

I think anglers have a lot to look forward to in the next few weeks when the seas become a little calmer.

FISH THE JETTY FOR LINGCOD AND ROCKFISH

Every year about this time, lingcod and rockfish wander in to our jetty’s rocks and take up residency in between and back inside the nooks and crannies of the boulders where they can easily view a meal in the light as it swims by.

You can fish for these ambushers by using 1-ounce jig heads with a twin-tail plastic on the back. Use any color as long as it’s white.

You have to remember that these fish are lurking deep within the spaces between the boulders, which they have made their homes. So if you want to catch them, all you have to do is pitch these jigs a few feet out from the bank and work them inward toward their homes.

First, and most importantly, fish the two- to three-hour window about two hours before high tide, through high slack and about one hour after the tide turns. Sometimes the first hour of low slack can’t be beat.

Most of these fish will be on the channel side of the jetty. The second pointer is not to cast out very far. Pitch your lures about 8 feet from the rocks and bounce your lures inward toward the rocks, paying special attention to spaces and pockets between the boulders.

Another tip is to work these lures on-the-drop, so they purposefully get hammered as they are sinking. Learn how to be a line feeler. For a right hander, if you’re using a conventional baitcasting reel, hold the line in front of the reel between your left thumb and index finger.

Reel with your right hand. As the lure is dropping, a bite will feel like a little BB hitting the tips of your fingers. If you feel anything like this, reel up the slack while pointing your rod tip downward, set the hook, and hold on.

If it’s a lingcod, most likely it will try and head toward you to get back to its ambush spot.

If a fish does head back inside the rocks and you are feeling your line as previously described, often you will feel the line scraping against the boulders.

If you sense this happening you can often get your lings in by immediately putting your reel in free spool. After a few seconds they will venture back out of the rocks when you will get a second opportunity to fight the fish again.

Make sure to carry a long-handled gaff with you to stick your quarry.

Tight lines!