Rocky
Article by Ray Helaers

I have had to revise my usual schtick regarding black rockfish.
         I usually start out with rockfish not getting any respect, how Northwest anglers often wonder why God would even bother making one, let alone why anyone would catch one on purpose. I dutifully admit that rockfish, with their mildly hazardous spines, funky mottling, and big heads, don't measure up against the flashy hydrodynamics of the salmonids. Then I reveal how my sensitivity and good sense have led me to divine the qualities in the rockfish that make him a worthy sportfish, his spirit, tenacity, and above all, his agreeable nature.
        The problem is the premise no longer holds. The rockfish is enjoying a bit of a rehabilitation, especially among saltwater flyfishers. Traditional saltwater anglers are noticing, and coming along a little, while still scratching their heads. It's a little funny that the guys who are supposed to be the snobs are the ones opening their hearts and their figurative creels to the poor maligned rockfish. But I haven't spoken to a flyfisher lately who doesn't want to go fish for rockfish, or if they already have, go back.
        The appeal is not rooted in rarity or exoticism. The rockfish is pretty common in these parts, widely distributed, as the biologists say. Surprisingly enough in today's world, he is still doing fairly well throughout a good part of his range, knock on wood.
         Neither will the rockfish provide epic battles, fodder to bore your non-angling acquaintances with. A five pound rockfish can put a deep, parabolic bend into an eight weight, and peel line from a good saltwater reel, but he is not lightning fast, won't display any acrobatics, and is not particularly long winded. The rockfish's main appeal comes from his tendency to school and his undiscriminating appetites. Put plainly, the rockfish is a sucker, and what he promises is constant action.
         Black rockfish are often found on or very near the same grounds as the more glamorous coho or chinook, which makes them handy when the salmon turn skittish or snotty. Where salmon populations have declined, rockfish often still persist in reasonable numbers, providing good fishing where we otherwise might be considering the pleasures of sea-kayaking, or anti-establishment sabotage. But I resist thinking of the rockfish as a diversion or a consolation prize. I've had too much fun with him, and I'm often thinking about edging over toward the kelp and tying on a white and orange half-a-rabbit, even if the coho are still biting.
         I first became acquainted with Mr. Sebastes melanops 19 years ago, at Humboldt Bay, in Northern California. I was on a trip with a long-since departed girlfriend, a drive from San Francisco to Arcata, where she had spent her early University years, to be followed by a bass-fishing expedition to Shasta Lake. In those days, I was actually uninterested in salmon, or any saltwater gamefish. The largemouth bass seemed to me the perfect and only worthwhile fulfillment of sporting promise, the plastic worm the acme of angling.
         But Cathy wanted to go to the beach and explore the mile-long south jetty at Humboldt Bay's entrance, a place where she had often gone to escape from the regular pressures and sometime loneliness of freshman life far from home. While at the time I was disinterested in saltwater fishing, I have always had a deep affinity for the ocean, having spent nearly every day of my adolescence surfing waves along Southern California's beaches and rocky outcrops.
         We drove southwest from Arcata to the mouth of the Eel River, where I stared in wonder at a massive, ancient logjam of old-growth redwoods, each log as big as a school bus. On Highway 101, along the Eel's South Fork canyon, a small, modest sign marks the highest water level recorded on the river, a dozen or so feet above the road surface, nearly a hundred feet above the river channel. The Eel River watershed regularly gathers more than 90 inches of rain a year, nearly all of it falling from December to March. Almost every giant redwood tree that makes its way into the river, one of California's longest, is eventually swept to tide water. Some of the trees were over a thousand years old when they fell, nearly 400 feet high.
         That logjam at the Eel's estuary is a quarter-mile long, a hundred yards wide, layers and layers deep. I was 23, on a trip with a girl for one of the first times in my life. I looked at that great tangle, and at that pretty girl, who I might have loved. I was struck by the incomprehensible enormity of time. It never even occurred to me to guess that one day she would be gone, and that it would be a relief to us both.
         We drove on to the harbor mouth, and scrambled over the broken basalt and granite boulders of the jetty. Farther out, the rock gave way to a jumble of massive concrete slaps, then finally a locked puzzle of gigantic, three-pronged concrete jacks, 15 feet high, an artificial echo of the Eel's tidal logjam.
         People were fishing along the inside of the jetty, spread out on the concrete and rock. A distinct tide rip ran along the jetty toward the harbor, and the anglers cast their baits and lures upcurrent at the seam, letting their lines swing around underneath. They were slaying them. Continuously, several anglers had fish on simultaneously. Most quickly dispatched their catch, and threw it into a bucket over ten or so of its kin. The fish were all the same, a chunky three to five pounds.
         "What are those things?" I asked the angler nearest me.
         "Black snappers," he answered, setting the hook on another one.
         They were black rockfish. I admired their appearance, like a darker, spinier, supercharged bass, and couldn't help but notice that the fellows throwing artificials were outfishing the bait fishermen by a considerable ratio. The preferred lure was a six-inch curly-tail grub on a lead-head jig.
         I had something like that in my car.
         I left Cathy there, scrambled up and down the half-mile of boulders like a crab, rushed to the car, grabbed my box and a worm rod and headed back. The tide rip had reversed, and everyone was heading in.
         "Don't bother," my informant told me as he passed. "They turn off like a faucet when the tide changes."
         It was another 15 years before I finally got a chance to catch one. I got to do it with a fly rod. It took two minutes, and in another half-hour I caught my next dozen.
         Shawn motored the skiff slowly toward the kelp paddy, about the size of a highrise heliport. The kelp marked an isolated spire in an open basin between two small islands. The basin was sheltered by a series of broken wash rocks, about a quarter-mile out. After the wash rocks, the next stop was Japan. To the east, the sun was just coming over the sheer granite spine of Vancouver Island. Mike stood on the fore casting deck, and I was at the stern.
         Shawn crossed back and forth off the kelp, watching the depth-finder.
         "There they are," he said. "About eighteen feet down."
         We cast uptide and let the shooting heads sink as they swung around. When the line pointed satisfyingly toward depth I started a slow, jigging retrieve. In two or three pulls the line got a little sticky and I set the hook, the rod bending deeply, the line strumming and thumping
         "I got him," I said.
         "Me too," said Mike.
         We kept saying that all morning.
         I tried to fly up to BC for a day of coho fishing with a friend who has a plane and it didn't work out. Fog kept us from landing till afternoon. We got to fish for three hours. In a little notch in a kelp bed, rockfish rolled and cavorted on the surface, herding and smashing candlefish that tried to leap onto the floating kelp. We didn't have time to switch to floating lines so we cast directly at the fish and stripped before the line had a chance to sink. There were too many fish to actually notice one turn, but we set the hook when we saw our orange half-a-rabbits disappear. We flew out just as the fog was rolling back in. Charlie wants to do it again.
         I was fishing on the clock with Steve, who edits a flyfishing magazine. We were drifting a usually productive pass through an indifferent tide and the coho were somewhere else. We could go look for them, or we could mosey over to the outside of the wash rocks and prospect for rockfish. We still didn't have any coho pictures, but what the hell?
         The water rose, foamed, and drained hissing from the rocks. We let the boat swing through a small bowl. When it spun out of the bowl, we'd motor back in. On each pass we'd score a double or two, each fish a replica of the last, deep bellied, a little short for their weight, about three, four pounds. We kept at it for an hour or so. At some point Steve noted that if you couldn't like this, you just didn't like fishing.
         Tom McGuane is my hero because he writes better than anyone, and there is something to be said for what he calls the "long silences," the long periods in between hookups that serious anglers come to accept, even love, in the pursuit of glamorous, challenging, badly wanted game, permit, steelhead, and the like. He laments the boredom of the heavy kill. Well, I don't know. If it's quiet you're looking for, steelhead and salmon are about as laconic as they come, and I do appreciate the challenge/reward equation. But I, for one, have spent enough silent hours with a straight rod in my hand, peering over the gunwale, wondering what the hell is wrong down there. I can't look a gift horse in the mouth.
         The rockfish never rejects me. He is like a loud, good-natured drunk, happily innocent that he may be making a fool of himself, simply intent on having a good time, and making sure I'm having one too.
         It's easy to characterize the black rockfish as too gullible, even dumb as a brick. I prefer to think of him as a good sport.

 

Article	050
Created	6-4-2004
Author	Ray Helaers
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