ESPN Freshwater

BROOKINGS, Ore. — Spawning season is upon us, and that means groundfish are starting to school up and move into the shallows of Oregon's south coast.

Every year without fail, in between the storms of January and February, there will be a string of days where the ocean lays down like a lake, providing good opportunities for boaters and shore anglers to cash in on aggressive lingcod, cabezon, rockfish and surfperch.

Those days may be few and far between, but if you're not out there, you're missing some of the best fishing of the year.

Reefy waters

Steve Weber of Brookings holds a freshly caught lingcod.

In fact, there are so many reefs in this vicinity that charting all of them would be impossible.

Boaters need not travel far from the jaws of the Chetco to hook up with toothy lings.

Reefs start forming immediately as you start heading uphill or downhill from the red can buoy, only a ½-mile from the river mouth.

A depth finder is a great aid when targeting holding areas.

One echo on the graph signifies a sandy bottom — not a good indicator for rockfishing, though a perfect spot for lying out a few crab traps while you continue trekking onward to find a few ling holes.

When your fish finder shows three solid echoes, you're over a rocky reef.

Look for multiple abrupt changes in depth where the bottom alternates from high to low on a regular basis.

These spikes signify pinnacles, high rocky points where lings and cabbies are getting ready to deposit their eggs.

How to

Whether you fish with shrimp-flies, bait or lures, the principle remains the same: Fish as close to the bottom as you can without resting directly on the bottom, cranking the reel handle with one hand while feeling your line with the other.

With shrimp-flies and bait, use as light a sinker as necessary. Kick your reel into free spool and let your rig hit the bottom.

Take up the slack and reel up a few feet, then after a several seconds, flip your reel back into free spool and let your sinker hit the bottom again, repeating the process.

One of the tricks of not getting hung up is to reel your rig up the precise moment it bottoms out.

If you do sense you've hung a rock, don't pull your line tight, but immediately put your reel in free spool, giving your line a few feet of slack.

Then shake the slack line up and down with your rod tip until it just meets the tension. Often this will free your gear.

Leadfish tops

A leadfish is probably the No. 1 ling-killing lure of all time. They range from 1 ounce to several ounces and can be made out of ordinary rebar.

It doesn't matter whether they're painted or not, because a falling leadfish is readily detected by the fish's sensitive lateral line.

To properly fish a leadfish or a twin-tail jig, you want to purposefully fish them on the sink. Big lings are suckers for any falling bait because it resembles a wounded fish.

If you're right-handed and using a conventional reel, always keep the reel in the upright position and feel your line in between the thumb and index finger of your left hand to detect the strike.

For a left-hander, reverse the process.

Let your jig drop to the bottom and take up the slack. Lift it sharply about 2 to 3 feet then let it fall back to the bottom on a semi-slack line.

Keep repeating the process and watch your line.

Ninety-nine percent of the time your strikes will occur when the lure is falling.

When you hook a fish, the first 10 seconds are the most critical.

Really put the screws to 'em to bring them out of the pinnacles, or else they'll break you off on the sharp jagged edges of the reef. Be prepared to lose tackle.

In fact if you don't loose a rig or two per trip, you're probably not fishing correctly.

Tide fishing

To be most productive, learn to fish the tides.

On incoming tides, the kelp and underwater grasses lean toward shore, so that's where the fish will be, waiting for the food to come to them.

When the tide is outgoing, everything lays the other way. So as the tide lowers, the fish move progressively offshore.

The best time to fish any tide is one hour before and after the tide changes.

From shore

For the shore fisherman, tidepools aplenty hold lingcod, cabezon, black rockfish, gopher rockfish, brownies, striped perch, red-tail perch and wolf-eels.

Two items of tantamount importance when fishing tidepools are a tidebook and a watch.

Head out one hour before low tide and head back no later than one hour after the tide changes to avoid getting caught by the incoming tide.

Three other necessities

hip boots, a gunnysack to keep your fish in, and a long handled gaff. You can make your own gaff out of a broom handle and a 14/0 hook.

The best holding water is a deep pool that leads to an exit containing a sharp bluff on either side.

At low tide you can see fewer fishing holes, but you know that the ones you do see will always hold fish.

If you're using bait, fishing with anchovies and 3/0 snelled hooks from a drop loop works well for lings, cabbies and black rockfish, but use smaller hooks such as 10s for greenling and perch since they have smaller mouths.

You tend to lose a lot of rigs when fishing with bait inside the tidepools, because of the numerous swirling kelp stringers that abound.

Plastic options

If you don't want to lose any rigs at all, plastic worms are for you. Fish with large white twister-tail worms with a 1-ounce egg sinker ahead of it.

First thread your sinker through the line, and on the end tie a 3/0 bait-holder hook.

Rig the worms Texas-style, just as you would when bass fishing, in order to keep your outfit weedless.

Peg the egg sinker with a toothpick to keep it stationary, and make a cast.

Fish these worms on the sink as well.

When fishing this way, you can pull your rig up and over a kelp stringer, and let it fall back to the bottom numerous times without getting hung up once.

If you feel one or two tiny taps between your thumb and index finger as the worm is sinking, hold your rod down toward the water, set the hook and get ready to gaff your fish.

Perch tech: When fishing for striped or red-tail perch, look for sandy areas near rocks and jetties.

Often you can see the top of the fish's dorsal fin sticking out of the water as they forage for sand crabs and shrimp.

For surfperch, fish the incoming tide, about 2 hours before high tide. Use an 8- to 10-foot stout rod with 15 to 20-pound test.

On the end of your line tie pyramid sinkers ranging between 3 and 6 ounces, and tie two drop loops 18 inches apart above the sinker.

From these drop loops hang two pre-tied No. 10 snelled leaders.

Use natural baits such as sand crabs, bloodworms or pieces of shrimp. Fresh mussels are also hard for perch to resist.

To keep mussels from flying off your hook when you cast, wrap a 4-inch piece of lightweight cotton thread around the bait.

Material from Fishing & Hunting News
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