Fishing for Halibut?

Yesterday we went fishing for halibut in the bay. Instead of heading left out of the harbor, like we usually do when we go up river, we headed right. Dylan has been halibut fishing just about every year we've been here, but this was my first year going. In order to go halibut fishing the conditions have to be absolutely perfect. The seas have to be calm and the tides have to be right. Yesterday the high tide was at 6 or so in the morning so we headed out at 4:40 a.m. It was dark and chilly. I haven't seen night in a while...we already have super long days and very short nights. We traveled out the 40-50ish miles out into the bay and this year for the first time set a skate. A skate is when you have a long line of rope and shorter pieces of rope connected with a hook and bait on the end. We're able to fish halibut this way because we have a subsistance permit. If we didn't have this permit we'd have a limit of how many we could catch per person per day. The above picture is Dylan pulling in the skate and checking for fish. We only caught one fish with the skate and it was a yellow-fin sole. They are similar to halibut but they are much smaller. We didn't catch any halibut only a few more of the yellow-fin sole with rods and reels. Other exciting events for the trip was that I got sea sick, we saw a porpoise, and a cute seal popped it's head up and down a few times near our boat.