crazysandeel was minnow silver (home poured), and the jig head was 3/8 oz. It's only about 20 feet deep along the foot of the north jetty, and 3/8 oz gets you into the mid water column. The mistake people make when fishing the jetties is taking the term "bottom fish" at face value. Black rockfish especially are structure oriented and semi-pelagic, in other words they hang around things like rocks, but aren't sitting on the bottom, they kind of hover over the structure, often in schools. So when fishing along the jetties, the structure is not underneath the boat, it's beside the boat, i.e. the jetty. My best results, especially for blacks is to try to work along the face of the jetty, casting right up to the edge and working the jigs down the face of it. And that's why I use relatively light jigs, a heavier jig just means more snags (and that's why I make my own tackle, too!) The grave digger jig I use with the gulp sandworm is a Do-It mold and that's 3/8 oz too. The greenling hit that about the time it reaches the foot of the jetty because they are demersal (bottom huggers), blacks like that gravedigger/gulp sand worm combo too, I've caught a lot of them on it. If you ever watch a video of spawning polychaete neiris sandworms, you can see why they would be attracted to this combo, the sandworms spawn in swarms, and it must be a feeding frenzy when they do. This video
is from New Zealand, but this is typical of spawning swarms of polychaetes, especially those which form epitokes (free swiming segments of their bodies which bud off and swarm in a mating frenzy). I'm betting that when blacks or other nearshore fish see a 2 inch gulp sandworm, they are just programmed to nail that epitoke straggler.
