A few years back I began fishing halibut with lures from the surf. Initially my results were pretty poor and I would more often than not leave the beach having caught nothing. My main problem early on was my unwillingness to accept the surf environment for what it is. Usually I found myself throwing large lures with heavy line, the idea being that halibut were out in deeper water and to reach them I needed to cast as far as possible. Often I found myself thinking about my next cast before I had even retrieved the lure half way back to the beach. This inexperience in the surf environment and a lack of observation lead me to believe that consistently catching halibut from the surf was an unlikely prospect. Through trial and error and much observation, my opinion began to change.Observation came in two forms. First, I needed to build confidence that halibut were in tight to the beach and in good numbers. By wading around in the surf with rod in hand and stirring up countless short and many legal fish with my feet, it quickly became apparent that halibut did love the shallow environment around beaches with calmer surf. I also observed on several occasions halibut getting airborne above the surface of the water while chasing bait no more than 50 feet from the beach. I knew then that halibut were in close to the beach and aggressively feeding. Second, I wanted to observe one of the few fishermen I had heard about who reportedly caught halibut consistently from the beach. Luck was on my side one January morning while fishing the beach around the Santa Barbara Harbor. I ran into a gentleman who already had two legal halibut on his stringer and caught a third while I watched him fish. He was gracious enough to spend a few minutes showing me his tackle and discussing why it works. Not surprising was that he was using swimbaits. What did surprise me, however, was that he was using very small swimbaits with lightweight leadheads on only 6# line. As he explained it, day in and day out, subtlety is the key to catching halibut in the surf. This one phrase was the key that opened the door to productive halibut fishing for me. I have built upon this knowledge with personal experience over the last few years and have outlined below the tackle, techniques, and types of areas I have had success with.
