Just wondering what you guys use for bottomfish/lingcod in any of the ocean areas like Westport, Neah bay, Sekui, ect...... Jigs. Bait. Whatever.

The Zzinger is an awesome lure as are Buzz Bombs. If the current will let you get them down, the 4-ounce sizes are great. If you need to go bigger try the Halibut Spinnow. Truth is they will eat almost anything. The old timers who fished them commercially with rod and reel often used a simple pipe jig, which was nothing more than a piece of copper pipe with lead in it and big trebles attached.

I used to go up to Neah Bay with Grandpa back when I was a young(er) punk and we would use, I think, some kind of rubber, pigtail type jigs. Don't remember what the name or manufacturers were but he'd trade boxes of Gamis for boxes of jigs. Maybe Bluefox made them?

I use a simple plastic single tail 6 inch "curly tail" and a 4-6 ounce lead jighead. Best colors seem to be purple, amber and black. I think the key is the scent. I use the scent from Halibut.net or any Halibut/Bottomfish scent.
These fish are pigs and will eat anything though, so empty your tackle box before spending alot on new lures.
Good luck-

We were at Neah Bay the middle of May for 4 days & used exclusivley leadhead jigs in from 1 oz to 4 oz depending on how much current, where we were & how deep. On these we used plastic curly tails in about any color.

For casting & retrieving near the top of the water some of the guys were using 1/2 oz.

We found that Do-It spearhead jigs worked best for us as we were in NEAR the rocks. This spearhead jig is slender & has the hook eye in the middle of the lead kind of balanced. If you got it snagged in the rocks, give it a little slack & twitch the rod a few times. It seemed that since the front pointed end was what got snagged, by jiggling it the line purchase in the middle sometimes allowed the front to tip down & we got back over 1/2 of the snagged jigs.

Went to Neah bay with some friends last year. We do good using a white point wilson dart with a pumpkinseed grub on a siwash hook. We caught both sea bass and ling cod.

I think I caught at least one of everything trolling herring deep with an 8 ounce banana weight last weekend.

My best luck seems to be when I use a 3" yellow curly tail SCENTED grub for black rockfish. Bottomfish don't seem to be very picky about what kind of natural bait you throw their way as long as it is fresh, impaled on the hook in a natural position and presented in a natural way. I use prawns and squid for the most part and seem to catch just about any kind of bottomfish. You ought to pay attention to bait/hook size if you are looking to catch perch or flounder. The other guys seem to have cavernous mouths that can easily swallow a 2/0 hook. Using a larger hook size will not only allow you to use whole baits, but will also reduce hook swallowing. I can't think of a time where the fish discriminated against the size of your hook.