Pacific Northwest Bottom Fishing Guide

Bottom Fishing Guide

Salmon, crab, and bottomfish are all in a good day out of Hammond, Oregon (near Warrenton and just a few miles from Astoria).

Late June through July, I’m running out of Hammond on the ocean. We head out to the ocean for some amazing salmon fishing, then we pull crab on the way in, and if the time and tide are right we’ll drop on bottomfish too.

  • Crab: I keep pots out in the ocean the whole time I’m down there. We pull them at the end of the day, rebait, and drop them back in. Fresh Dungeness to take home.
  • Bottomfish: mostly lingcod, rockfish, cabezon. If you want to skip the salmon and just hammer lingcod all day, I’ll do that too.
  • Crab and bottomfish are bundled into the trip – no separate charge. Bottomfish is subject to having the time and the right tide; if not, we grab the pots and call it.

Sea conditions: my boat handles up to about a six-foot ocean swell comfortably. If it’s blowing and choppy on top of the swell, we’ll make a smart call, which sometimes means fishing inside the river instead of crossing the bar – always safety first.

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Lingcod: aggressive fighters and great tasting fish. This one caught on a recent trip.

Bottom Fishing: What You Catch

Nearshore bottom fishing out of the mouth of the Columbia River puts you onto the hard structures where these tasty fish live. The mainstay is rockfish, the genus Sebastes, and these waters hold a real mix of them. Black rockfish (Sebastes melanops) and blue rockfish (Sebastes mystinus) show up in numbers, with copper, china, quillback, and other species rounding out the day in a run of colors from jet black to bright orange and rose. They hit hard, fight all the way up, and fill a cooler with clean white fillets.

Lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) might be the trophy of the reef and the fish many anglers come for. Despite its name, it is not a true cod at all: it is a big-mouthed, canine-toothed hunter that lies in the rocks and crushes anything that swims past. Lingcod are so aggressive they will clamp onto a hooked rockfish and ride it to the surface, and the good ones push well past three feet. They are prized on the table too. The fillets can run a startling blue-green, but they cook up pure white and are delicious.

Cabezon (Scorpaenichthys marmoratus) the largest of the sculpins and a true bruiser of the rocks. Scaleless and mottled in brown, red, and green, it hunkers on hard bottom in near-perfect camouflage, then hits with surprising power for its size, with the biggest fish topping twenty pounds. Cabezon are excellent eating.

These fish give a hard-pulling, great-eating mixed bag and a day of action!

Give me a call or drop me an email and let’s go fishing and catch some fish!

Ask me about guided fishing trips for:


If you want to arrange a guided fishing trip and don’t see what you want email me at benparkerfishing@gmail.com or call me on 503-310-5724.

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