halibut rig

[Fiskadoro]

Originally Posted by dorado50

Man thats alot of halibuts you have caught! You must take home alot of cash from all the halibut tourneys around here.

What can I say it's Santa Monica Bay. We just don't have the fish you guys have down In La Jolla. Used to be for most of the year the only quality fish you could consistently catch around here were halibut. Back in the 90s it's about all we fished for, other then Mako's in the summer.

I used to live right next to the beach in Venice and surf fished every day before work, then got a different job, moved on to my boat in a slip at Redondo, and pretty much fished there every day after work while living there. That's when I really started fishing Halibut. When I got tired of the live aboard thing, I built a skiff that I used for butts out of MDR, and then ran a Sportfisher out of MDR for a while. So yeah I've targeted and got a few butts, in a few different ways. After a while it adds up. For me I remember almost every trip I catch fish though the weights and dates get murky.

Check this one out...

That's got to be well over a decade ago. I look like a kid... You can see where I'm fishing, it's not SMB but local, and I'd say that fish was probably around ten.

That day I was fishing with a real Halibut expert, a man who used to commercially hook and line fish them in the harbor. He was fishing is standard thirty pound gear working trapped rigged baits with eight ounce sinkers. I was fishing a Kencor 10-30 zebra, my dads old ABU 5600c with twenty pound spectra, seventeen pound Stren Fluorocarbon, both of which were new things back then, rigged with a red plastic slide, four once sinker, three feet of leader and a snelled trap hook. That's only the second reel I ever spooled with spectra, and the first time I used it for anything other then offshore tuna fishing. No-buddy was using it for anything other then backing back then.

We got three halibut that day. I got all three but what was really cool was early that morning I hooked and released a 70 pound Black seabass at the long beach end of the harbor on that same rig. That was a pretty rare catch there back in the day. Tuff fish to get to the boat on just a 17lb leader. Before I hooked that Black my buddy was giving me a hard time about light tackle, and spectra. He honestly thought it would cost me fish, but he didn't say much after that Black.


As to Money yeah well I guess you could say I won my share, mostly from the monthly MDR bait dock jackpot.

This fish from the same time period netted me a few bucks.

Same gear but in SMB. That morning it was dead calm with no current so I was casting and working a glow scampi tipped with squid, bouncing it next to some stones up at the Getty. We got three fish over twenty two of which were over thirty in a couple of weeks there, though that was the only one landed on plastic.

Personally I never liked fishing the big Santa Monica Bay tournaments. With the sheer numbers of fisherman they put on the water it becomes more about the luck then skill.

I have fished a few of them mostly because people just talked me into doing it with them. I only know one guy who ever won big money. He got his fish maybe a quarter mile away from me. 40+ pounds bigger then my best, hell of a catch on the ten or twelve pound which is what he was using. We'd been sharing info all morning. When he got it I told him he'd won the fn lottery.

Jim