Adventure - Halibut Fishing with North Country Charters

The Take

Stats

Difficulty: Easy - Moderate                                                                      Time:  Half-Day

Summary

I love halibut, but we don’t own a boat.   So we decided to try halibut fishing.  For our first trip, we decided to try North Country Charters.  They were offering a ½ day halibut-fishing trip on 20 Aug that suited our needs.

Opinion

Good trip!  WIth day old or worst halibut running $21 to $25 per pound we decided to fill
the freezer with fresh halibut because it should be cheaper than buying it.   My husband and I caught our limit (so did everyone else on the boat) and came home with 15.8 lbs of halibut filets.  My freezer is very happy.

Trail Advice

Dress in layers and bring a jacket.  Temperatures on the ocean can vary from warm to downright cold.

Bring water or tea unless you like coffee.  Coffee is provided, but anything else is up to you.  Bring food, too.  The trip ends before lunch, but starts pretty early and we got hungry.

Bring a camera, ideally with a good zoom.  You never know what you might see.

If you are prone to motion sickness take Dramamine or us a Scopolamine patch.  When fishing, the boat rocks with the waves and it is easy to get sick.

Suitability

One of the people on our boat brought his son who was probably about 8.  The kid was safe enough, but a bit too small to easily fish for halibut and seemed rather bored.

Starting Point

If you pay in advance and know your way around the trip starts at the dock at the boat.  If you need to pay or don’t know your way around, your trip starts at the charter headquarters on the Spit and they take you to the dock.

The Adventure

I love halibut.  Surprisingly, in Homer, the “halibut fishing capitol of the world”, it is very hard to find fresh halibut for sale.  The best you can do is buy it from one of the traveling sales trucks or from one of the fish packing places, but the price isn’t significantly better than you would get in the lower-48.  If you know someone with a commercial boat, you can sometimes arrange to buy some from them, but mostly the commercial fisherman sell all of their catch directly to the distributors; there is no fish market.

So, when I decided to get some halibut for the winter, we had two choices: get a friend with a boat to take us out or take a charter.   None of our friends chose to invite us along (bummer), so we decided to take a charter.  Since we had no way of choosing one charter company over another, we visited several of the charter houses on the spit to find out what they had to offer.  The charter companies were very similar in price and offered service.

When we chatted with North Country Charters we asked about ½ day and full day trips.  They gave us the following information.  You are more likely to catch big halibut on a full day trip because there is more time to go fishing and they can take the time to get to spots that are further away.  However, you are very likely to catch your two-halibut limit either way.  Then they pointed out that the cost of a ½-day fishing trip was half the cost of a full day, so if you did two ½-day trips (on separate days) you paid about the same and had good odds of coming in with more halibut than you would on a full-day trip.  Since we are local and can afford the time to do two ½-day trips, the logic made good sense to us, so we rewarded them by choosing them for our trip.

We met at the16 person boat, the Irish, at 0630 on 20 Aug.  This was 30 minutes later than they had left all summer, but with autumn coming on, the sun was coming up at 0615 and they slid the start time back so they could leave in daylight.   The weather was supposed to be rainy all day, but we got lucky--sort of--it didn't rain on us the whole time.  However, it was gray skies with no break the entire day.  The seas were very calm with only minor swells and no significant waves.

The Irish is a larger boat and had internal seating with tables for all of the customers.  We all had a seat, produced our fishing licenses and signed the legal paperwork, and then the boat was off.  By the way, we recommend buying a halibut derby ticket if you are going on a Homer halibut trip.  The tickets cost $10 a piece and are good for one day, but if you catch a tagged fish (and there are many) you could win as much as $50,000 or a truck.

Otter in the Distance

We drove for about an hour to the fishing site.  On the way we passed a handful of otters, a lot of logs, and a lot of murres, cormorants, and gulls.  We knew we’d arrived at the right spot when we saw the six other boats all setting up in the same area.

Fishing for halibut involves a short, sturdy pole with a big reel; a big, circular hook baited with herring; and a massive weight.  The fishing method is to let out the line until the weight hits the bottom of the bay, since this is where the halibut generally hang out.  Some of the crew told us stories about earlier in the year when they couldn’t get the hook to the bottom because the Silver salmon were taking the hooks before they could get there.  That must have been an interesting day.  It is legal to catch your limit of both salmon and halibut on the same trip.

Halibut Storage

After your weight hits the bottom, you wait for a slight tug that indicates you either have a fish or have lost your bait.  In the beginning this is tricky because there isn’t a lot of difference between the fish and the current if you don’t know what you should be feeling.  Anyway, when you feel the tug you start reeling.   And reeling.  And reeling…  Even if you don’t have a fish on your line, hauling in 200+ ft of line is a lot of work and takes forever!  This is why I’ve listed this as easy-moderate difficulty instead of easy.  If you do have a fish, it can be harder.  The fish we were catching were fairly small (10-20 lbs) and many of them didn’t put up much of a fight.  Chris actually reeled on all the way in before he realized he’d actually caught something!  When the fish come to the surface, the crew gaffed them, marked them, and put them in storage.

A Good Catch

Waiting for a Handout

It was a good day.  Everyone caught their limit, even if some fish were small, and we headed back in in time for lunch.  On the way back, the crew cleaned the fish and threw the guts off the back for the gulls.

Representatives from Coal Point Seafood met us at the dock.  If you want them to, they will cut your fish into small filets and freeze your catch for a small fee.  Their freezers are set to -30 degrees so the fish freeze fast and solid.  This helps keep the fish at its peak.  If you are from out of town, they can flash freeze your fish is a shorter time and will even help with shipping if you want them to.  We chose to do this because I’m not an experienced filetter.

All in all, this was worthwhile and we’ll do it again.  We’ll be using a different company next time.  Not because we were dissatisfied, but just to see what the others offer for a comparison.  You'll see those write-ups as we take more trips.