Halibut

We had to give up looking for salmon after a while, so that we would have time to fish for halibut. Mark took us to an area where he said the halibut were less common, but it was his favorite spot to find the big ones. It was a really pretty spot, calm and near shore, where we could see a couple of waterfalls.




It's lovely, but there are no fish here. We fished for a while, and pulled up a half dozen cod, and even a nice rockfish, but no halibut. The rockfish is pretty, and its good eating (it's a snapper), so Al, who caught it, decided to keep it. This is Captain Ron with the rockfish



So we moved to another spot, near a boat that was catching ( and was friends with our captains). In fact, the other guys pulled up a 90 pound halibut! The kid who landed it is smaller than the fish!

We started getting bites right away, and we pulled up and released a number of small fish, hoping for a bigger one. Unfortunately we didn't catch any big ones, so after a while we started keeping the small ones so we would make our limit and have fish to send home. We caught 4 (just for me and Todd, the boat caught about 10 total), the sizes ranged from 15 to 30 lbs. I caught the biggest at 30lbs here :



I'm almost glad I didn't catch a bigger one. This was a lot of work! Halibut can really feel like you are pulling up the entire bottom of the sea, even the little ones. We will both be sore tomorrow!

And here is Todd posing with his salmon:



The captain fillets our fish right in board, and tosses it in a plastic bin. It turns out Todd's salmon is a rare white king, which is supposed to taste even better than the regular pink kind. When we get back to the dock in homer, it is almost 6PM. The folks from the fish processing center meet us at the boat, and take our cleaned fish off to be vacuum packed, frozen, and packed for shipping. They will hold it for us and ship after we get home. We have almost 50lbs of fish!

Location:On Kachemak Bay