On April 21st, I went on a charter boat out of redondo beach, california to target rockfish. Usually, as some of you may know, I am an inshore pier fisherman. But this is the first time i've been on a boat, and I caught my first rockfish.
Some of the fish were indeed small, but since we were deep dropping for these fish using 10 ounce weights, you are forced to keep the small ones because their air bladder and eyes expand due to the pressure from bringing the fish up out of the water from over 200 feet down. Every drop takes about 1 minute for your weight to hit bottom and it takes forever to crank it back up when you got a fish. I personally was using a penn jigmaster combo filled to the top with 25 lb mono. Braided line would be preferred as the sensitivity of the bites were very low since we were using huge weights and it was so deep.
Sometimes when you bring your rig up, you dont even know you have a fish on unless it is a big rockfish because of the weight and current is so strong.
