By Ed Oldham

Thursday, April 10, will mark the opening of this year’s halibut season and early indications seem to point that 2008 will be a to a good one.

The lucky angler might find a 100-plus pound slab on the end of your line.

There are plenty of areas close to the island that have produced some nice halibut. If you remember last year’s 135-pound monster caught just off of Fort Casey.

All the banks will be teaming with boats looking to hook into these excellent-eating fish. When fishing the banks, I tend to start in about 125 feet of water and work my lure deeper to around 300 feet.

Artificial baits are a very popular technique, but I tend to stick with the big black label horse herring. I’ll even touch it up with a squid or baby octopus just to give it a little extra scent.

Keeping your bait on the bottom is the most important thing, but I would also recommend not to get carried away when you get that first bite. Now if it almost jerks the rod out of your hand, that would be different.

Last year I only tried using the downrigger once, but I plan on trying it a few more time this year.

The idea is to find a nice sandy bottom and bounce your downrigger ball off the bottom. Set your bait out about 15 feet from the back of the boat and hold on. Once you’re hooked up the fight should be exciting without the two to three pounds of lead on the line.

If the halibut are not biting then you have until April 15 to hook into a salmon and from recent reports, those that are being caught right now are a bit bigger than they were in the beginning of the season.

Cut plug herring has seem to be the bait of choice, with all the areas reporting spotty action. If you can get up to the north side of Orcas Island, they have had some fish weighing over 20 pounds that have caught.

The Anacortes Salmon Derby was this past weekend and the winning fish went to Nancy Cabe. Her fish weighed in at at 24.22 pounds and she worth a grand prize of $10,000. Imagine get paid that much just to go fishing.

The second-place prize of $5,000 went to Keith Olson’s 19.64 pound king and the $2,500 third-place prize went to Rod King’s fish weighing 18.34 pound. In fact the top 10 fish caught all weighed in at over 15 pounds. Congratulations to all of them!

I think I am going to have to get into the derby fishing. There are some real nice prizes to be had and there are a lot of great people to meet as well.

For those that watch Glenn Hall’s Hawg Quest, he was filming at the derby and it should air sometime this summer.