For the past couple of years I've been itching to give this squiding thing I've been reading about a try. I had a few hours to kill in between jobs on Friday night so I after a late lunch I headed over the the fishing pier by the grain elevators in Seattle to see of I could "wing" my way through this without looking like too much of a noob.

The first hour or so was spent waiting for it to get dark, getting a feel for how the jigs felt in the water, watching what others were doing, asking as many questions of those around me as I could, and over all just shooting the breeze with the other anglers that were there. On one cast, as I was working my jig back towards the surface, and just as it was coming into the ring of light, four "ghostly" dark shapes that looked like a pack of wolves suddenly appeared out of the darkness and they were closing in on my jig. At first I thought they were fish (earlier we had seen 5 or 6 nice sized salmon swim out from under the pier) and I asked the kid next to me if he saw them. He said, "yeah, but those aren't fish, those are squid." I paused my retrieve, dropped the rod tip and watched as all 4 of them darted in for the jig. I felt the rod get heavy, reeled up, and had my first ever squid! For the next 5- 10 minutes everybody's rod tips were bending as squid were being hauled in all around me, but for some reason I only managed to get just the one.

Things got quiet after that for 20 minutes or so and then, BOOM, the water just exploded! There were rod tips bending, people reeling, squid flying over the railing into buckets, squirting both water and ink everywhere . . . it was plain old crazy insane! The kid next to me finally told me what I was doing wrong (letting my jig fall too deep) and after that it looked like I actually knew what I was doing. The rest of the evening was pretty much the same thing. There would be a lull of 5-15 minutes and then, BOOM! Another "pack" of squid would swim by and things got crazy again. Sometimes people had two and three squid on one jig.

During one of the lulls I inquired about the time and was surprised to find out that it was after 8:00 so I decided to call it a night cuz I still had to go to work. I headed back to my car with a guesstimate of around 6 lbs in my bucket (I counted 48 squid the next morning). Beginners luck? Maybe a little, but I contribute most of my success to not being shy about asking questions of those around me, and more importantly, their willingness to share their knowledge with me. It made for an enjoyable first time out for me. It probably helped that there were only about a dozen people there, so it wasn't as bad as some of the pictures and reports that have been coming from the Edmonds fishing pier.

There were a few things I learned about squiding which I'll share here: 1.) Wear rain gear. When things got crazy there were squid being hauled over the railing and into buckets and the whole time they were squirting water and ink everywhere! My faded blue jeans were actually starting to turn blue again. 2.) It does help to put a corky on your line to make it easier to keep track of and help keep tangles with others to a minimum (I actually read this on Seattle Pats earlier post). 3.) Although most people don't mind sharing their light source (at least where I was), it's probably better if you bring your own. 4.) Cleaning squid is more time consuming than all those YouTube video's make it look like. After four hours I finally had to take a break to give my feet and back a rest.

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