By Roy Lawson

   Chumming is something every saltwater angler should know to ensure success in today's heavily pressured fishing areas. A successful day on the water goes not to the angler with the most expensive boat, fastest boat or the one who has all the latest tackle, but to the angler who knows how to chum properly.

   I have been fishing for almost six decades and have been captaining fishing boats for more than three decades, day boats, overnight boats and multi-day tuna trips out of San Diego, plus running my own six pack charters in between. I have been a salmon guide in Alaska in the early seventies, a bass guide on Southern California's famous bass lakes, and the secret to my success has been chumming where legal, and if not legal I could have tripled my catches if it was!

   Knowing how and when to chum is a major factor in most captains being successful. If you are not a good chummer you will not be a successful fish catcher. There is a lot more to the game than just throwing some baitfish in the water and expecting lots of fish to show up and start eating every bait thrown in the water. In real life this seldom happens. There is a great deal of difference between chumming on a sport boat that has a bait tank that holds thirty to sixty scoops of bait and a small sport fisher such as my boat "The Top Gun" a twenty four foot CCWA that holds at most one and a half scoops of bait. The skipper on the big sport boat with thirty scoops of live bait can chum till the cows come home and still not run out of chum or hook bait.

   When you are driving a small boat with a one to two scoop capacity bait tank you have to be careful with your live bait. Nothing is worse than finally getting some fish going in the afternoon then discovering all your live bait has been chummed and you have no hook bait left. The strategy I use is as follows: When I go to the bait dock I have a five gallon bucket ready, I have the bait dock attendant put about sixty percent of my live bait in the bait tank and the rest in the bucket. This I cut into one, to one and a half inch pieces on the way to the first stop of the day. I also buy a five pound box of frozen squid and cut about half of it into the same size chunks ( the rest goes back into the ice chest in case any large game fish show up ) Now I have quite a bit of chunked chum.

   My first stop is usually a rocky reef built by the California Department of Fish and Game some twenty five years ago, that sits in sixty five feet of water, it is about forty feet long, fifteen feet wide, and eight to ten feet up off the bottom. It is one of eight similar rock piles built at the same time, by building many smaller reefs instead of one large one the Fish and Game biologists tried to spread the fishing pressure over a larger area. That call was one of the few that they got right, kudos to the DFG!

   Next I take a marker I have made out of a plastic coke bottle, with old mono wrapped around the front of the bottle, then the rest wrapped around the middle and a eight ounce sinker tied to the end of the line, when thrown overboard the bottle spins and the line rolls off and when the sinker hits bottom the bottle stops and and the front aims into the current.    Now drop your anchor upwind with adjustments for currents and hopefully you end up just in front of the reef about thirty feet in front of it.

   Now I start by chumming six to eight chunks a minute and all hands watch the chum stream carefully, most days it takes five to ten minutes for the fish to show up. After fifteen minutes go by with no fish, it’s time to go check out another rock pile. Usually after five to ten minutes fish will start swimming up the chum slick, feeding on the chunks, now is the time for live bait! I start by throwing one or two live per minute amongst the chunks and have everyone fish live bait. Hookups are quick and steady; you don't want to feed the fish lunch, throw just enough chum to keep the fish interested and hanging around and competing for the chummed baits.

   Once the fish get to feeding well and you start catching some two to four pound bass, now it’s time for "big baits". I will hook a large tom cod or other brown bait through the nose and let him go play in the chum slick. If I don't have a brown bait I will use a small to medium mackerel or a whole dead squid to try and entice one of the grumps that call this reef home. Instead of the ten pound test I use when fishing live bait I switch to thirty pound mono with a eight foot fluorocarbon leader in twenty five pound test fished on a Penn Jigmaster high speed reel on a seven and a half foot med/hvy rod.

   The heavy line is necessary due to the size of the fish that call these reefs home. I have caught black sea bass to 125 lbs, white sea bass to 55 lbs, halibut to 47 lbs, yellowtail to 32 lbs, barracuda to 12 lbs and countless calico bass from five to eight pounds with a few to ten pounds sometimes thrown in the mix. 99% of calico bass over four pounds are released to live and give some other angler a special thrill when he is again caught and released.

   These big calicos are to special to be caught only once killed and eaten. The small fish are much better to eat anyway, the big girls are old and tough. It takes twenty years to grow a ten pound calico bass. It takes one year to grow a forty pound tuna, and in the tuna's forth year it can weigh almost four hundred pounds. Know your targeted species habits, calico bass usually bite until ten thirty am then the bite quickly tapers off and dies by eleven am. This is the time new clients are asking "why aren't you still chumming?" "Why don't we move?" I tell them no use chumming until two pm, that's when the bass will start to come out and play again. About ten till two I start throwing chum again and by two people are again hooked up. If I did not know the habits of my quarry I could have chummed until the cows came home and wasted all of my chum for one or two small calicos. Know the habits of your quarry whatever it is, save your hard charging for the times fish are going bonkers. This way you can make a small amount of chum last a long time, and maximize your catches during the times of plenty!