A kind stranger saves our day of fishing

I’ve always wanted to catch a lingcod. They are one of the biggest, ugliest, and most delicious fish in Puget Sound. Two years ago, I brought an acquaintance lingcod fishing who had never done it before. Using my boat and my gear, and following my instructions, he caught a huge 34″ beast just five minutes after dropping his line in the water. I still haven’t caught one to this day. I’m on a mission now. This year’s lingcod season just opened, and Saturday was our first opportunity to fish. 

The best time to catch lingcod is near slack tide. The most effective way to catch it in our area is with live bait. So before you can catch your fish, you must catch your bait. This adds an extra level of challenge to the game, and you have to allow time for this before your slack tide window. Looking at the tide chart, we saw that the first slack tide would be early in the day, around 9:00 a.m., so we agreed to meet at 4:30 so that we could be on the water at first light. In the morning the weather was a little worse than forecast. It was raining slightly, and it was a bit windy at the boat launch. We had a short discussion about whether or not to proceed, and agreed that we could always turn back if it didn’t look good once we got out past the jetty. When we launched it was still dark enough to need my running lights. 

As we exited the channel into the bay it was a bit choppy, but nothing too unusual. As we passed the Mukilteo Lighthouse, the water got quite smooth and the sun came out. It was going to be a nice day after all. We passed the ever-present sea lions lounging on the Possession Point buoy off the south tip of Whidbey Island, cut the engine, and started fishing for the sand dabs we planned to use for bait. These bottom fish are usually quite easy to catch, but this time we were coming up empty. 

The view of the morning sun peering through the clouds was stunning. However, after trying a couple of different places over half an hour without success, we decided to try something else. In a seminar I had learned about a place called the “Bait Box” for catching shiner perch, which fishermen call “pogies”. The Bait Box was a bunch of old pilings just north of Possession Beach Park. We went looking for it, and it turned out to be obvious because there were several boats there fishing already. We were surprised to see that the boats had actually tied up to these pilings. We found a spot and did the same. We dropped our gear, which consisted of several trout-sized hooks on a line baited with squid, with a weighted ball on the bottom. We watched guys on other boats catching lots of little fish, while we caught nothing. I started bemoaning our situation to a nearby charter captain, and asked him what we were doing wrong. He said that our rig would never work for pogies. He went into the cabin of his boat, came back with a small package, and offered it to us if we could bring our boat around to his. We accepted his kind offer. I brought the boat around while Dave made the handoff. We set up the new rig, which consisted of a dozen or so tiny hooks with little feathers on them, with a weight but no bait. Almost instantly, we started bringing the little fish aboard, sometimes five or six on the line at a time, and putting them in a bucket of sea water. That charter captain, who I later learned was Captain Dale of Ruby D Charters, had saved our butts that day and put us back in the game. 

We headed back out to Possession Point, where we tried to fish around an old wooden ferry they intentionally sank there in 1979 to create an artificial reef. Other fishermen had reported that they caught a lot of lingcod there in the previous couple of days, but only one boat we saw there had caught anything yet. We saw the legendary local guide Brianne Bruce there, who I hired three years ago to teach me kokanee fishing. Even she hadn’t caught anything yet. We would hook the mouth of a pogie and keep it underwater with a six-ounce weight, just off the bottom. The goal was to drift with the current and keep our lines as close to vertical as possible. We had to keep the motor running and one guy stationed at the helm at all times, to bump small amounts of power to counteract the current. The other guy’s job was to bounce our lines off the bottom, and then reel up slightly to keep them from getting snagged. In spite of this, both of us frequently snagged the bottom. Dave snapped his line twice because of this, and had to attach new lures. I was able to free mine in every case without losing any gear, but I always lost my bait fish.

We expected slack tide to end around 10:00, but in fact the current continued to slow for a couple more hours, finally becoming truly slack around noon. This gave us lots of unexpected extra fishing time, and reminded us that slack current really does lag behind slack tide by a couple of hours. When the bait fish started to run low, we decided to try a new location. We saw a lot of boats around Scatchet Head to the west a few miles, and headed over there. Right as we arrived, we witnessed a charter boat bring a lingcod aboard. It was the most action we had seen all day. Looking at the chart, we noticed that a lot of boats were fishing over a big hole in the bottom of the sea, so we set ourselves up to drift over it several times. One of our silent drifts took us very close to a buoy, close enough to hear the grunts of its resident sea lions, and to clearly hear the bell attached to it. When the pogies ran out I decided to start fishing for sand dabs, and finally got one. It was too big for bait but big enough to eat, so I saved it and ate it for dinner the next day. It didn’t help us to catch any lingcod though. We finally gave up and headed for home with just the sand dab in the kill bag, with a pit stop at Possession Beach. At least my ice wasn’t totally wasted. 

The dock at Possession Beach is really sketchy; it’s where I punched a hole in my fiberglass last summer. In all but the highest of tides, only a small portion of the dock is in the water. It’s challenging to moor there without scraping the bottom of the boat on the rocky bottom. The bathroom there is similarly sketchy, but it’s the only one accessible by boat for miles around. We pulled in and tied up, but we noticed that the outboard skeg was already on the bottom. So, I retracted it just long enough for our pit stop. When it was time to leave, I had Dave hold the boat against the dock by hand until the last moment. The second he jumped aboard, I gunned the motor in reverse to clear the dock as quickly as possible. 

After that experience, we had a relaxed 45-minute cruise back to Everett. When we arrived, we noticed that the new fuel dock was finally open and the old one was closed. They were also in the process of demolishing the old Everett Yacht Club building, which had stood there since 1967. The new fuel dock feels huge. It’s higher than the gunnels of my boat, and has many more pumps, as well as a bathroom. The Port of Everett is perpetually changing. It’s a great place to be a boater and a fisherman. Back at the boat launch, we had no good news for the State fish counter who approached us there. We vowed to return the following weekend to try again, this time armed with a little more knowledge and experience.