Do halibut get the bends

I was having a conversation with Chad Calder, owner of Chad's Coastwide Sports fishing in Port Hardy, British Columbia. They specialize in chartered fishing trips where there are abundant migratory and local stocks of salmon, halibut, and bottom fish. Chad was telling me about the huge halibut they catch on a routine basis. "We catch halibut weekly well over 200 pounds. In Canada, no matter where you fish or which charter outfit you fish with, you can legally only keep a halibut that is up to 133 cm which is about 75 pounds. It's a beautiful fish. We try and target fish in the 60 to 75 pound range and you also are allowed to take home a fish that is roughly around 20 pounds. We catch larger halibut but we just have to legally release them. If you take a halibut off the bottom and bring it up, does it get the bends? no they don't and that is a great question. It has been proven over the years, even worse than that. Halibut come up in the drag fisheries all away from Alaska down here to British Columbia. They have an incredible resilience to just about anything. Because we fish, most of our fish with circle hooks, it is very easy for us to release them off the side of the boat and they haven't got any of the hooks swallowed down, etc. etc. So the mortality rate is very very low on those big, big fish.

http://coastwidesportsfishing.com

Ph: 1-877-779-9094 Cell: 1-604-765-0436