Every boat that leaves the Homer Spit in September is supposed to be chasing halibut. That is what the signs on the charter shacks say, that is what the photographs on the cleaning table show, and that is what my friend Russ told his wife we were doing when he booked a skiff for two days in Kachemak Bay.
We did not chase halibut. The skipper, a lean woman named Deb with a voice like a foghorn and hands like baseball mitts, looked at our seven-foot bass rods and asked if we were lost. When Russ explained that we wanted black rockfish on light tackle, she smiled for the first time and turned the bow toward the kelp reefs off the south shore, where the water shoals up over rock and the tide rips around the points.
Black rockfish school in the upper water column over structure, and on a good day they come up to meet a small swimbait like it owes them money. Deb set us up on a drift along the kelp edge, told us to let the lure fall for a count of ten, and then went back to her crossword. My first drop got hit on the count of four. The fish ran for the rocks, the little rod folded into a horseshoe, and I laughed out loud the way you do when something is much stronger than it looks.
For three hours it was a fish on almost every drift. Charcoal backs, gold eyes, the size of a good loaf of bread. Russ hooked one that pulled him halfway around the skiff before he got its head up, and a tufted puffin paddled over to supervise. We kept our limit for the pan and let the rest swim back down to the rocks, grumbling.
At the cleaning table that evening, a man with a sixty-pound halibut asked what we had been fishing for. Russ said rockfish, on purpose, and the man looked at him with real concern. Then Deb walked by and told him we had outfished her entire halibut fleet by count, which was true if you define outfished very carefully.
Russ’s wife has since seen the photos and wants to know where the halibut are. He has told her they were very shy this year.
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