damn, 450' a whole lotta work, taking a straight heavy drop. On an off day scouting trip, spent much of a day searching for some peaks I found on an old nautical map (pre GPS), ran across 3 peaks that thrust straight up to 180' from 350', turned out to be loaded with lings. Used my radar for finding it going forward...12 miles off one landmark, 13 miles off another. Back when my depth finder was a Furono chart recorder, paper slowly unrolling onto the floor as we ran...lol
Out here we fish live flounder for pretty much all of our lingcod fishing. We stop to catch flounder every morning on our way out. It's a great way to get the blood flowing, get people used to the gear, and for catching lings it just can't be beat. Plus catching flounder is just fun as hell
Inshore, flounder out fishes everything bar none. We didn't used to do it as much when fishing deep water but over the years that has changed. We get em on herring and other bait when fishing Halibut, and pipe jigs will definitely get em as well. The problem with jigs is that it is so physically demanding. Most people run out of steam pretty quickly when jigging that deep. Anymore I don't run jigs on my boat hardly at all, but it does work and there is a time and place. Flounder also greatly minimizes bi catch such as yellowe eye, skate, and dog fish. Lings will eat damn near anything, including each other, but I'll put live flounder against anything out there for day in, day out lingcod fishing.
In the event of an apocalypse I'm taking a boat and some flounder gear. Won't have any trouble feeding myself, and I dunno if I could ever get sick of eating lingcod
Flinging big stuff is really dangerous. I remember fishing for yellow tail off a big day charter boat in San Diego where there was an area for us folks throwing Tady's, basically big 1 lb. jigs that you cast with 40 lb line as far as you can and then retrieve back as fast as you can. A guy walked thru the area for casting jigs without looking and he was hit and got knocked out, just as well the the treble went in the top of his neck/jawline just missing his jugular and ripped up to his hair line. It was horrid. The skipper had a coast guard cutter steam right out immediately. A deck hand hosed off all the blood off the deck and we call got back to fishing, eventually...
every charter skipper has similar injury horror stories, as well as the occasional heart attack requiring CPR and a CG chopper airlift. Got my 60 ton license at 25, and it was a wake up call for maturity having to deal with unexpected situations that often involved big hooks, bad attitudes, and alcohol...there are two hard rules for skippers, return your passengers safely and never lose control of your vessel...put in enough days at sea and there will be challenges to both