puget sound lingcod

[longknife]

Didnt mean to litter your thread,,,

You were just making me jealous....

Hell, we have to keep up with all your good luck!!

[Sneaky]

The slot-sized fish taste better than the big ones anyhow, Lokidog!. Way to stack em up on the inside. What colors are you using?

To me, the location is more key than the lure (I have caught lings on all of my home-mades, in colors pink, blue, silver, glow, white, chartreuse, you get the idea.)

Here are some pics of my ling lures: poured in a custom mold my dad made and painted with whatever color + UV clearcoat/glitter


Some detail of the eyes/gills



Color lineup -  Candlefish (~1 oz) Herring, Chartreuse, Glow White, Glow (~10.4 oz)




crappy cell pics but you guys get the idea! Beats the heck out of snagging 5 bucks here, 7 bucks there, 3 bucks here...I also make intermediate sizes (~2 and 3 oz) in different shapes (candlefish, shad). All have caught fish.


Some lings from the sound (prior to 36" max, this fish was 37 and change if I remember right).

[h20hunter]

I like the blue ones. Pretty funny giving the neighbors packs of mint colored fish. They all know it is perfectly tasty and whitens up when you cook it. Still fun to explaing to folks that don't know better. Some nice fish and good looking darts.

[lokidog]

Sneaky,  we just use lead head jigs with an 8" curly grub tail or a 5" double tail.  I predominantly use chartreuse metal flake but was not able to get them in a timely manner this year so used white, glow, and a bright rootbeer color, all of which caught lings.  I don't use any bait on them unless I have some thawed out herring or a previous one spits up something reasonably fresh.

I mostly use 4 oz as I am usually battling current and/or wind.   I like using smaller ones as they have a nicer presentation on the drop.

[Sneaky]

h20 - those colored lings sure are funny things. I was told that the blue color comes from eating shellfish. Ever catch a green one? I have caught them out of the kelp beds while seabass fishing. Meat is green! cooks up white and no flavor difference I can detect...


Loki - speaking of fresh bait, we had a ling cough up an entire octopus tentacle! it was probably around 2 ft long streched out! tipped one of my jigs with it and sent it down, caught a small cabezon. You never know what they are going to barf up!

[carpsniperg2]

Love those lings! I got to get me some one of these days!

[lokidog]

My first lingcod was a 12 pounder I speared with a hawaiian sling down in Coos Bay, OR.  It was a green colored one.  I was taking summer classes (out here from WI) at the OR Institute of Marine Biology in Charleston.  I got back to campus, fileted it, put it in the fridge and went straight to the library to see what was up with the green meat.  I searched and searched (no internet in 1985) and could not find out a reason for them being blue/green.  The only note I found said something like lingcod, prime table fare, meat is sometimes blue, turns white when cooked.

Trying to figure it out, I came up with the idea that the lings that are blue have a higher portion of their diet being crabs since crabs have hemocyanin, a copper based blood pigment that is blue.  Kind of like flamingoes turning pink because of the pigments in the shrimp that they eat.  I have recently learned that molluscs also have the same blood pigment as crustaceans.

It would be interesting to get some lingcod eggs from blue and regular fish and raise them feeding them different diets to see how they turn out, ie. will a ling with blue parents that only eats fish still turn out blue?

[blacktailcrzy]

i would share all my fish but my camera takes over 2000 kb is there away i can size them down

[carpsniperg2]

i would share all my fish but my camera takes over 2000 kb is there away i can size them down

Yes there are a lot of programs that you can use to resize the pic's. I use microsoft picture manager. All my pic's are way to big to post and I always have to resize them.

[blacktailcrzy]

here is one live bait helped me with more pic of other fish from the year i will share later  (35") 

[Rob]

Three divers, three ling, in 26 minutes.  We hunted area 8-2.  Not too Shabby!  (I'm the only one in the photo, but there were three of us hunting!)

We were very happy that they were all in the slot.  One was one inch over the minimum, one was 2 inches from the max, and the last one was smack dab in the middle.  You need to get a eye for it when spearing, trying to guess a ling's length inside of a 10 inch slot is nerve racking!  The orange tape on the gun is the slot.

I shot the smallest one, and was pretty nervous until I got it on the ruler.  It looked bigger when I pulled the trigger!  Very hard to judge-remember, everything looks 25% larger underwater!

Still lots of ling out there in the slot!  And man oh man was there a lot of gear on the bottom!  Jigs and darts everywhere.  I even pulled up a nice danforth Anchor that got snagged.

[h20hunter]

Nice hunting. Fish and chips time.

[Rob]

Oh, if anyone needs an anchor, let me know.  I have 2-3 that I have pulled up over the years so I don't need this one. 

No charge, just need to meet me in the Bothell/Bellevue area.

The anchor is in good shape, it has 10 feet of chain that is pretty well rusted and probably not worth saving.

[h20hunter]

Regarding the green ones. I don't think it is from eating shellfish. I think it is simply a different gene, like having blond hair or black hair. I've seen/caught/speared blue green ones plenty of times.

[Rob]

I recall reading something from by Dr. Milton Love (Rock fish SME) on the color a few years back.  He stated the blue flesh was from diet.  Fish eaters have white flesh, crustacean eaters have blue flesh.

http://lovelab.id.ucsb.edu/books.html

I looked for a quote from him but could not find it easily enough.

He could be wrong I suppose, but he is probably the world's foremost expert on rock fish!