Fished Neah Bay lake last week and also Juan de Fuca Lake for bottom fish.
While I never got to try the texas rigged worms.... beats me why... I did get to throw a lot of regular jig heads and a couple of weedless ones.
We started out fishing freshwater spinning outfits loaded with 8 lb test. Found it kinda hard on some of the fish as they liked doing loop de loops around kelp fronds.
So, shortly thereafter we switched to the casting rods with 14 lb test and a bit stiffer rod tips.
I tried getting out to Tatoosh and a spot close to it that Easy Limits id'd for me. Tatoosh was a little bouncy, popcorn water is what I call it, so we didn't even turn the motor off, just turned around and started back. Carl gave me the location of a good bass spot. Turned out when we got there the bass were visiting relatives and not home.
So, bottom line was most of our catching was done down at Seal and Sail rocks. That place held "black bass", greenlings, cabezon, lings and other assorted spiny-type bottom fish. When it was windy I left lots of jig heads hung in the kelp as I couldn't cast parallel to the fronds.
Finally towards the end of the trip I bought a couple of weedless jig heads over at the General Store. Thought those things wouldn't last any longer than the unprotected heads I was currently using. Boy was I in for a surpise. After I got over being cautious I ended up casting them into the thickest kelp patches and kept bouncing those jigs right back out. One time the jig didn't bounce right back at me as a 10 lb ling was in real shallow and wanted that jig more than I did. Well, that's what he thought as he ended up in the boat.
I fished white worms, a greenish colored worm, red and pinkish ones, and also red and black skirts on the jigs to simulate crab. Only ones that seemed to hold an edge over the others was the white worms. Don't know if that was because I fished them more, or if the color white is a better color for fishing shallow.
One more thing I played with was tipping the hook with a small sliver of squid. Seemed that once the fish grabbed that jig and worm combo it didn't spit it out and kept holding it because of the squid.
That's the Neah Bay lake fishing report.
Only other thing of note was a fellow fisherman when asked to show me his fish, stuck his fingers in the mouth of a cabezon to raise it up. He found out cabezon had teeth that would dig into said fingers, and I watched him trying to shake the fish off... just like crabs that nip fingers. Afterwards he was bandaging bleeding fingers.
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zen leecher