Greenling minimum size for South Puget Sound???

Anyone know the minimum size for Greenlings in South Puget Sound?

You find em' here?

From the WA regs I don't see a minimum size.  Greenlings are defined as bottomfish, and I don't find a specific callout for greenlings:

From page 18:
Bottomfish Includes Pacific cod, Pacific tomcod, Pacific hake (or whiting), walleye
pollock, all species of dabs, sole and flounders (except Pacific halibut), lingcod, ratfish, sablefish, cabezon, greenling, buffalo sculpin, great sculpin, red Irish lord, brown Irish lord, Pacific staghorn sculpin, wolfeel, giant wrymouth, plainfin midshipman, all species of shark, skate, rockfish, rattail, and surf perches
excluding shiner perch.

No Min size for greenling, use them for Ling bait just caught a 12 pounder on a little greening.

No Min size for greenling, use them for Ling bait just caught a 12 pounder on a little greening.

Now this brings up an interesting rules clarification.  If a greenling is defined as a bottomfish, that makes it a gamefish, right?  And if it's a gamefish, it's not legal to use as bait, as I understand it.  Anybody actually posed the question to WDFW before?

The restriction on live bait is not mentioned in the saltwater rules.  Additionally, the only limitation I can find that applies to saltwater is:

Use SALMON, HERRING, or HALIBUT for anything other than human consumption or fishing bait.

I don't think we need ask anyone anything.  The live bait restrictions listed are for freshwater.

Where would you catch lingcod in the South Sound area? That I could use greenling for bait.

My friend caught this monster ling with a small, live greenling (about 10") 2 weekends ago at Neah Bay. 

Where would you catch lingcod in the South Sound area? That I could use greenling for bait.

There are a few spots Lee and I found this year. We'll take you along when season opens. I don't want to post them incase non-members are ghosting the forum. there's not many spots to get them down here, and we managed to stumble across a couple of productive ones. We just didn't catch any in the slot. We pulled a few under lings on gulp jigs, and I got one over size on a 13" live sole.

Yes, by all means never mention any of those spots on the internet! They would be fished out in a New York minute. I'm not kidding. It happens.

When I was renting a cabin just across the road from the water near Crystal Springs on the W side of Bainbridge Is in the early 80's, I'd still catch True Cod there. In the spring the True Cod would be thick in Agate Pass southwest of the bridge, and the sport boats would be so thick it was often a zoo. I was catching them right out in front of the cabin I was renting.
The combined pressure from the sporties and the commercials soon fished 'em down so thin that it caused the fishery to collapse.

Its 100% guaranteed that there are report-chasing lurkers out there reading this!
I'm sure that there's lots of hungry anglers salivating over the possibility of finding lings in the S Sound. Let 'em go find them on their own. Somebody will soon enough. So share with your bros in private!
The jetty here where I live is well known and heavily fished, and the fish population gets hammered pretty hard each year. Seems to recover during the gnarly winter months, but i've noticed that the fish population may have gone down a bit along it in recent years. I haven't been catching as many as I used to, of most species.

Lots of places from the south sound to San Juans, to Strait and ocean all have big lings. I know some spots that are right in the middle of productive salmon fishing that have produced 40+" lings. No need to go far, just search carefully.

Z

PM me, I'll share a spot that's only for yaks from the beach.

Or come on out this way, Ling are open for about another month in area 4.  We'll go hunt them and catch some nice Seabass.