tag wires in black rockfish

[pirk fan]

I fished out of Newport today, didn't touch a salmon, and finally decided my one lonely flasher and hootchie just didn't have the drawing power of a boatload of lures. So I zipped down to my favorite bottomfishing spot and got 10 black rockfish in about 30 casts (not another boat in sight, all out salmon fishing.

FYI:

When I got back to the docks at South Beach, the salmon checker scanned the belly of each of the 10 rockfish for coded wires, just like the wires in hatchery salmon noses. Apparently, in April they caught, with the help of some of the local charters, more than 2000 black rockfish and carefully decompressed them and planted wires in their belly.

I believe she said that so far they have seen 26 of the fish recaught, which would be less than 3%. This might be somewhat good news - there are lots of black rockfish, and the coded ones are diluted out in a fairly large population, or the coding process had a high mortality rate.