By the first week of September, Seward has mostly quit pretending it is summer. The tour boats thin out, the silvers are past their peak, and the mountains at the head of Resurrection Bay start wearing new snow every few mornings. What is left out there is weather and lingcod, and only one of those is good company.
Lingcod are not a fish you go looking for in open water. They live on structure, the rock pinnacles and reefs out toward Cape Resurrection, and they sit on the up current side waiting for something to swim past at the wrong depth. So you run out, find a piece of rock on the sounder, and drop a heavy jig or a big swimbait straight down until it taps. Then you crank. The entire method is get to the bottom, get off the bottom, do it again, and try not to leave forty dollars of lead in the rocks on every drift.
The strike is less a bite than a change in the weight of the world. No run, no head shake, just the sudden sense that your jig has been swapped out for a cinder block with opinions. Then it comes up in short violent pulls, and somewhere around halfway to the boat you find out whether you actually hooked the thing or whether you hooked something else entirely.
Because the other trick a lingcod has is hitchhiking. It will clamp onto a rockfish that is already on your line and simply refuse to let go, all the way to the surface, unhooked the whole way, holding on out of what I can only call spite. That leaves about a five second window at the boat for somebody to get a net under it before the fish reconsiders the arrangement. We got two that way and lost one, and the one we lost is the one everybody on board remembers.
Nobody is going to call a lingcod handsome. It is mostly mouth, with a head that looks like it was designed by a committee that never met, and the fillets sometimes come out a bright blue green that cooks to plain white and worries every dinner guest who was not warned in advance. It is also the best fish taco anybody on that boat had eaten all year, and we ate them at nine at night with the light still hanging on over the bay. The halibut crowd can keep their leaderboard.
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