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May 01, 2024, 11:30:58 AM
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General Fishing Tips / Re: Descender Weight
« Last post by Clayman on Today at 11:26:19 AM »Sounds like I might be a little light in my weights if I get a large Yellow Eye deep. The one I descended on 12 oz was only about 50'.It's interesting because it varies with each fish. I haven't seen much rhyme or reason to it. One yelloweye will come up all bloated from 100 ft, while another one will come up from the same depth and shoot back down the bottom on its own.
The annoyance of descending rockfish has changed how I fish for bottomfish in general. When I'm targeting rockfish over deeper reefs, I look for suspended schools and fish for the mid-water fish 20-40 ft down. They usually consist of the blues, deacons, and yellowtails that I'm after. When I drop to the bottom for lingcod, I've upped the size of my baits to avoid rockfish by-catch. If you use a big enough bait, you'll only get lings and nothing else (though there was one time where I got a big YE on a live blue rockfish, but that was an anomaly
). I lose out on some vermillion chances, but if I'm jonesing for those, I can go fish the 30-50 ft reefs where barotrauma and YE are less likely to be an issue.