Fishing with Art

June 26
     Our first day of fishing out with Michael's grandfather, Art! We loaded up the boat with fishing gear and headed to the bay in Newport, OR. I believe we were cruising out of the port into the ocean around 8:30 in the morning and it seemed like it was going to be nice weather wise.
     We dropped a couple of crab pots in 25ft deep water close to the shore and then left them to sit on the bottom on the ocean until we returned later. Art put cut up chicken parts in the bait boxes in the crab pots.
The pots are round with netted wire encasing two re-bar circles with two slots where the crabs crawl in. On the slots there is wire gates that only swing in but not out, so the crabs can't escape once in.
     After dropping the pots we headed out to deeper water to try our luck with halibut. We dropped our lines to around 200ft down. The lines are weighted with a heavy metal ball which sits on the bottom of the sea floor while a rod attached to the ball weight suspends a herring fish or other big bait. We didn't get any bites and after a while and squalls kept building out to sea and raining on us. So we decided to try our luck with different fish in shallower water.
   First line dropped into the shallower water (~60ft deep?) Michael hooks a cabazon fish and hauls it up. It a burly looking fish, almost prehistoric looking. All of its spines are somewhat poisonous and the fish had to be handled with care. Although we dropped him into the cooler and forgot about him for the rest of the day.

Michael's cabazon fish. It looks kind of prehistoric.

 We didn't have much luck the rest of the day. Nothing was biting, so we went back to the crab pots to find lots of crabs in the pots. But unfortunately you can only keep the male crabs, so out of a dozen crabs we caught, one was a male. It was so hard to watch Art toss all those big delicious looking female crabs back into the ocean.

Michael with his fish back at the marina.

Art filleting the cabazon fish. Apparently its really hard to kill these fish because
of the tough skeletons and had to fillet the fish alive :(

 
We did get to eat the one crab we caught back at home. And he was delicious! I'm not sure which was the worst way to go out being on the sea critters, filleted or boiled alive. Its a tossup.