ROCKFISHING : THE REEL CHALLENGE IS USING JIGS.

Byline: BRETT PAULY

The guys who fill their bags quickest on shallow-water rockfishing trips are the guys who drop heavy sinkers on lines laden with bait. They are the ones constantly working the rails, reeling up 30 fish in a day.

How can you miss? The strips of squid and live anchovies they dangle at depths of 30 to 200 feet are what the ravenous bottom dwellers they are targeting prey on every day.

It's the best way to pack the freezer, to be sure. But it can be exceedingly tedious, too.

To add excitement to the game, veteran anglers toss the iron - that is, they drop metal jigs to the bottom of the sea to tantalize the local denizens.

``Anybody can catch fish with bait. Anybody,'' said Westlake Village saltwater jig specialist Dimitri Peros. ``Iron makes it more of a challenge.''

I had been a baitfish angler on previous rockfish trips and was looking for a more sporting way to tackle the mouth-watering seafood.

``Jig fishing is in some ways analogous to freshwater fly-fishing. The key is the sport of it - being able to fool the fish into thinking that something artificial is natural,'' said Greg Pittenger of Redondo Beach, a high school biology teacher and avid fisherman. ``It's not the number of fish you catch; it's understanding the way you catch the ones you do.''

My kind of talk. Saturday aboard the Mirage out of Port Hueneme Sportfishing, my goal was to bring aboard a big lingcod on a jig and learn how and why the colorful bars of lead alloy can catch the eye of a trophy rockfish.

As skipper Joe Villareal scoured his tattered logbook with scribbled coordinates and studied his fish finder north of Santa Rosa Island before dawn, I armed my 50-pound line and heavy rod with a 6-ounce black Jax Jig.

The shade of the iron is one of several variables that will trigger a bite response from rockfish, Pittenger explained. A dark jig cast at dawn creates a silhouette in the water. It contrasts the increasing lightness of the sky and suggests something opaque, mimicking the presence of prey. As the horizon gets lighter, so should your jig.

The strategy paid off. I pulled up my first ling just after daybreak, but, alas, it didn't stretch to the 22-inch legal minimum.

Throughout the day, I tried hard not to be a lazy fisherman. I frequently changed iron to lighten the hues as the biologist suggested. I felt compelled to keep up with the big-game anglers of the San Fernando Valley Saltwater Fisherman club who hadchartered the boat and were steadily altering jigs and techniques to match the changing light and water conditions.

A cornucopia of rockfish followed - ocean whitefish, chuckleheads (copper rockfish), Johnny bass (olive rockfish), reds (vermilion rockfish), blues (blue rockfish) and a rainbow of others. Seventeen for me in all; not a bad haul. Included were two under-sized lings, which were tossed back with several other smaller rockfish to grow and reproduce.

By midday I had traded down to an extra-light rod and 15-pound line, which made the experience that more thrilling. In the process, I discovered the shade of the jig is merely one of the factors at work in this game.

Motion is another. So is smell, taste, color, the fish's attitude and the force of the current.

Rockfish instinctually respond to movement, which summons an automatic stimulation to bite. In behavioral terms, it's called a fixed-action pattern, Pittenger said. ``Fish have a sense that we don't have - the feel of motion,'' he said. ``They are able to detect the presence of pressure wave - or motion of another body in the water.''

That's why it is so important to bounce the jig - to move the rod up in down in a yo-yoing fashion.

Rockfish also can smell and taste. Many anglers therefore spread various scented oils, butters and pastes on their jigs. Once having bitten, the fish tend to hang on to the iron longer because it has the right feel and relish.

Long thought to be colorblind, rockfish actually can differentiate color, although determining what they prefer is exceedingly difficult and depends on the day, time and location. Anglers have their favorites, but Villareal believes it's as incidental as anything that a fish strikes a calico bass pattern over a jig of green, yellow and white or a purple-and-black beauty. His advice is to pay attention to what is hitting best and change jigs often to correspond to the hottest color. If nothing seems to be working, tie on a jig in a color that hasn't been tried.

Another component is irritability . . . of the fish, not the angler. ``If you have a fish like a lingcod, which has a very small home range, and you invade that personal space, the only weapons it has to attack with are its mouth and its teeth,'' Pittenger said.

So keep that jig right on the bottom, until the paint is scraped clean from the butt end, and it will eventual square off with an overprotective ling.

Villareal said the water's drift is also critical to jigging success. If the boat isn't moving, then the iron is bouncing in the same spot and probably scaring away everything nearby. If there is a huge drift and the angle of the fishing line is closer to 45 degrees, you can yo-yo the jig all day and it will never reach the bottom where the rockfish swim.

He suggests 4- to 8-ounce jigs for rockfishing the shallows.

And when the bite just isn't happening on jigs?

``You have to do what's reasonable: Fish bait,'' the captain said. ``A good iron fisherman has to know when to switch to bait.''

Of course, there are those purists who live and die by the iron. But on this day, when there were several long, slow stretches and anglers had to work for every strike, even the jigmaster himself, Peros, recognized that stripped squid and anchovies were the only way to bring up fish.

While there would be no trophies for me on the outing, I expanded my knowledge of the science of angling. More important, I came to appreciate that rockfishing isn't just about baiting lines and filling the freezer.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1-2--color) Oxnard's Robert Johnson, above, landed a hefty lingcod Saturday off Santa Rosa Island aboard the Mirage out of Port Hueneme. Anglers such as Rick Estrada of Sunland, left, use jigs in a wide assortment of colors, weights and shapes to target lings and rockfish in shallow waters.

Brett Pauly / Daily News