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Don Stroh dropped a large herring over the side of the boat and let it strut its stuff along the ocean bottom, but when his rod doubled over he had no idea what big bottom-dweller had swallowed his bait.

"We didn't know what the hell we had on," says Stroh, 66, of Central Point.

Eventually the enormous head of a big lingcod broke the surface, with all 28 pounds of ugliness eventually flopping into guide Andy Martin's boat for the catch of the day.

"That was a really good one," Stroh says. "I got another one 14 pounds, too. It was a good day. It's been a good year."

Fishing trips like Stroh's are putting a big exclamation point on the rebound of the lingcod fishery throughout the West Coast, and most emphatically in Brookings, where the port is in the midst of its best lingcod season since the 1990s when lings were nearly fished into submission.

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