Northwest Fishing Reports

I am going to try to fish the marinas and beach in the Bellingham area. I will use soft plastics with jigheads. What kinda fish could I expect to catch? Any other advice?

You mean like big 6" curly tail grubs???

You could get lings, cabezon, rockcod, flounder, bullhead, anything really...Try and get out as deep as possible....I never fish inside marina's, try and fish outside of them....

Good luck and report back..

The ling cod opened on may 1st and it sounds like there doing all right. My favorite thing about the salt is there is a lot of fish to catch. You can go down and get a pack of hearing and whip out half of a hearing and catch a number of diffrent fish. Most of them you wouldnt want to eat but you can still hook up with a nice flounder or rock fish. I like to use wire leader incase you hook into a dog fish

Starting around july the salmon will start in again and that is a blast. Go down to your local marina and throw buzz bombs for an hour. I live about a mile from des moines marina so it is pretty simple to burn even a half hour trying to get a salmon.

Also in july the crabbing will open. So when you fish every good tasting fish gets thrown on the BBQ and every garbage fish gets chopped up and thrown in the crab pot

All thanks for the advice. GPC what kinda fish I wouldn't want to eat? I will be trying 5" plastics called Big Hammer Swimbaits. They are hot down in Cali and you can use them in freshwater too. Sam why do you suggest going outside of the marina instead of where the boats park? Could you explain what you mean by outside of the marina?

Lip Rippa wrote:All thanks for the advice. GPC what kinda fish I wouldn't want to eat? I will be trying 5" plastics called Big Hammer Swimbaits. They are hot down in Cali and you can use them in freshwater too. Sam why do you suggest going outside of the marina instead of where the boats park? Could you explain what you mean by outside of the marina?

There are quite a few you dont want to eat. But there are so many in the salt I dont know the names for all of them. Sam might know all the names of the garbage fish but I dont. The most common Id say are the BIG bullheads, I know they arent called that but they look a lot like reg. bullheads and are huge compared to the fresh water kind.

The other fish you do not want to eat is a rat fish. I havnt caught one myself but I know people in des moines catch them. They say that they are so nasty that the crabs wont even eat them.

The other fish that you probally wont want to eat is a dog fish. They are a blast to catch and are easy to catch as well. But some people eat them Iv heard something like soaking them in milk for an hour or two and they are all right tasting. Iv been tempted to try them because sharks dont have bones and bonless meat dosnt sound bad at all LOL. But they are pretty, powerful creatures and I havnt been able to kill one yet. My father said when he was younger they told everybody to slit their throats before throwing them back in. But they are very important to the sea so if someone advises you to do so just nod your head. I mean its your fish so do with it what you want, but they do play a very important rule at the bottom of the sea

Another fun thing to do in the salt is locate a school of hogies, Iv always known them as perch but they call them hoagies at the marina. They are small little fish that you can catch one after another. Most of the time you use a line with 8 or so size 16 hooks and catch about 5 at a time. I dont know what you do with them as far as cooking but I just give them away. Most of the time its asians who are catching and eating them and they have many diffrent ways of cooking them. I heard the best way is to can them and eat them like sardines

If you catch and keep a cabezon that turns out to be pregnant be sure to clean it really well. Their roe is poisonous to humans. I'm not sure exactly how bad it'd mess a person up though. Here's a cabby:



If you're going to start fishing more in the salt a book I really found helpful for I.D.ing saltwater fish is "Coastal Fishes of the Pacific Northwest". It has color photos and black and white drawings of virtually anything you'll catch off the Washington coast, as well as a page long summary on each fish. It's like a $20 book I think, and 224 pages long, pretty well written. Oh! It also tells you what species are good to eat. I have a couple other books about our saltwater fish, but this one is my personal favorite. Hmmm, that probably came off like a huge sales pitch... well, your local Bellingham Library has eight copies, so you wouldn't even need to buy one!

Good call on the jigs; I perfer them to bait. I like to flip jigs along rocky points at any depth under ten feet (typically deeper is better, but sometimes shallower areas are totally overlooked by fisherman and therefor hold some fish), but any underwater structure can hold rock or lingcod. Best of luck, and keep in mind slack and incoming tides are the best time to fish the salt!... And if it looks like you're going to get skunked typically a herring off the bottom in like 30+ feet of water will attract a dogfish, which like GPC said, are great fighters and beautiful, under-appreciated fish.

if you hook up with a cab or a ling, and its blue inside, dont be scared to eat it! good stuff!

for some reason I thought dogfish were illegal.