Enter, right on cue, my first California halibut! I haven't made many serious attempts after them due to the depths, weights and baits involved. But now I know that, under the right conditions, you can catch a flatfish on a lure that runs around four feet deep. I was trolling an x-rap around striperish rocks near the top of the tide Friday when I got the strike of the year -- BOOM! something hit the lure so hard that the rod came flying over the cockpit rim and hit me in the chest before nearly being pulled back into the water. In this most uncharacteristic failure of my improvised rod-holding setup (which held the strike of 93 pound tarpon, after all), the bale of the reel got pried open, and I held the deeply bent rod for about 1.43 seconds trying frantically to pop it back in before the fish suddenly shook the hook free. "Whoah," I'm thinking, "was that a 25-pound striper -- or what?"
It was probably a 'butt. Trolling back over the same area I eventually got a smaller but still solid strike that came up big, brown and flat. A California halibut has to be 22 inches to be legal, and this one appeared to be just a wee bit bigger judged by the way he lay flopped over both sides of my cockpit. Not that he laid there for more than .37 seconds -- this guy gave up the fight pretty quickly, but reserved plenty of energy to make a terrible ruckus at kayakside. Lacking any kind of club and needing to bleed the fish for the table anyway, I jumped deep into the sea of bad karma and just cut the hallie's gills and let him take a few minutes to quiet down that way.
The next bit of knifework had me stumped: "so how do I fillet this flattened-out freak of nature?" For certainly a halibut is freakish, with its upturned crosseyes, tiny little gut cavity, and long, meaty flanks. It occured to me that halibut must have to feed constantly to stay fed, while a big-mouthed, fat old striper can gorge and nap Thanksgiving style. Anyway, the internets do come to the rescue again with helpful illustrated instructions on how to fillet a halibut.
Following a satisfying Sunday fish fry, I decided it is worth the effort. Not sure if I'm going to start drowning dead sardines with a six-ounce sinker, but I do think I might start refining my jigging technique. One can imagine how tasty a fat, fresh Alaskan halibut would be . . . and next summer I shall be quite determined to find out about that.
Speaking of new tricks, another notion filling up my fishing imagination is a trip to Baja California. Sierra, pargo, snapper, corvina, yellowtail -- how is it that this didn't occur to me before? A fishy friend has been stoking me up with his recent tales of billfish and dorado down in Cabo (by the way JT, if you are reading, would you like a couple of small halibut fillets?) By the end of my current work contract in February at the latest, I'm going to see about adding some of those new species to the list too. The future remains bright as a high seas sockeye!
