The vertex cover problem is one of a handful of problems for which kernelization—the repeated reducing of the input size via reduction rules–is known to be highly effective in practice. For our pace 2019 submission, we apply an initial aggressive kernelization strategy, using all known reduction rules for the problem. From there we use local search to produce a high-quality solution on the (hopefully smaller) kernel, which we use as a starting solution for a branch-and-bound solver or maximum clique solver that is applied on the complement of the kernel.