Hot Topics

• Beginning April 1 (and continuing through September 30):
  
  
  • Sport fishing for groundfish is closed offshore of the 30-fathom line.
    
    
  • The daily bag limit for cabezon is one, and that one cabezon is part of the 7-fish daily bag limit for rockfish, greenling, cod, etc.
    

Watch a yelloweye rockfish get released using a decompression cage. (3.6 mb) Requires Windows Media Player

In this video, a sport-caught yelloweye rockfish is placed in a cage and then lowered to about 70 feet before being released. Note the symptoms at the surface (gut, bloated body, disorientation). Upon descent, the gut retracts, and the fish shows good orientation before swimming strongly downward.

When rockfish are caught in deep water (>100 feet, or 17 fathoms), symptoms seem dire - protruding gut, bloated body and bulging eyes. If recompressed, a fish's immediate symptoms appear to resolve and many fish swim away. Long-term survival for these fish is not known.

This video was made in 2005 during ODFW research to evaluate how rockfish react to recompression.