Halibut Fishing Rods

If you’re gearing up for your first-ever halibut season—or perhaps looking to update your gear for the first time since 1981—the most important aspect to consider is HOW DEEP you’re likely to be performing most of your fishing, not HOW LARGE a halibut you would imagine you could catch. Halibut fishing can indicate deep-water fishing, especially down here in the south portion of the halibut’s range, from south British Columbia to your north coastline of Ca, incase you venture on the deep-water fishing grounds with undersize tackle, you won’t need to worry about what size a halibut you’ll hook since you won’t be hooking any. Inside part of the country, most halibut are extracted from 200 to 350 feet of water, occasionally 400, 500, 600 legs or higher! To achieve those depths, appeal and sinker loads are assessed perhaps not in ounces however in pounds, as it takes that much weight to achieve the bottom, where in actuality the halibut live. You can’t fish three-pound sinkers on steelhead drift rods and 12-pound mono, and that means you need match rods, reels and range towards sort of terminal equipment you’ll be fishing, never to the 20-pound halibut you are dredging up from those severe depths.

However, as you make your way up the Pacific coastline into northern British Columbia and Alaska, you’ll not just get a hold of an increased portion of larger halibut, but you’re prone to find them in shallower liquid. Each year fishermen along the west and north edges for the Queen Charlottes, throughout Southeast Alaska, Cook Inlet additionally the Aleutian Islands catch a huge selection of good-sized halibut in 75 to 250 legs of water. At those depths you may well be able to achieve base with sinkers, pipeline jigs or leadheads as light as five or six ounces on a slack tide, some heavier when the tide starts to operate. The rod, reel as well as the range needed to fish the lighter terminal rigs may be lots smaller, too.

With that in mind, below are a few tackle ideas for those looking to invest some of their fishing allowance on halibut equipment:

Rods

Needless to say, a rod that would be asked to raise and drop a 24- to 48-ounce sinker throughout the day is going to need some backbone. In case the terminal equipment alone leaves a 60-degree sag on it, the rod has way too much offer for good hook-setting and runs a high threat of blowing up completely underneath the body weight of a decent-sized halibut. But a cue stick to no action anyway isn’t good either; you would like it to bend about just a little to absorb the shock of the 50-pound bucking ‘but down there in the various other end of your range, particularly when your range is a no-stretch braid (which we’ll be talking about later on). A rod that won’t fold and a line that won’t stretch is a mixture that renders little margin for error when you’re playing a huge, strong seafood. If you wish to get an idea of how good a halibut pole might deal with a load, take a 48-ounce (3-pound) cannonball sinker and brief amount of range in to the shop with you and hang it from the pole tip. If it cann’t bend after all it's also stiff assuming the end sags half-way to the flooring it is much too light; someplace in-between may be the range you’re shopping for.

Keep in mind, too, that a rod with a fairly heavy action isn’t necessarily heavy in weight and ounces. You can find rods available nowadays that are extremely tough, well-made and powerful enough to handle any halibut, while evaluating so little as you are able to fish them day without feeling as you simply completed a decathlon. A heavier pole isn’t necessarily much harder on halibut, nonetheless it’s seriously more difficult on halibut fishermen.

For length, there’s a fairly wide range of views on what constitutes the “perfect’ halibut rod, from five legs to eight feet. We don’t like rods within quick end of the spectrum because We don’t feel just like I’m getting enough raise when I’m attempting to yo-yo a bait or appeal across the bottom in 400 foot of liquid. At the various other severe, I haven’t found numerous rods over seven foot long that are beefy adequate for fishing significant equipment in deep-water. The best halibut rods are all between six and seven legs long.