local Fishing Report 2023

Nov. 6

Well today wasn't at all what we expected. Last week it had been great yellowtail fishing in the zone we were in but for whatever reason most that fish wasn't around today. Famous words of Steve Loomis, "only one things for sure and that's that things will change". So true in life but especially true in fishing. Things will always change whether it be for better or for worse. Unfortunately today it was for worse. That's why you can't base your booking a trip on last year or even 2 weeks ago. Oh well. We caught a few nice yellows today and lots of other species we saved for meals later on in the trip because they'll be tasty. We're now heading south. We're going to start fishing first thing tomorrow fishing for D, all of the above.

Passenger Mike Payne brought a whole bunch of crab with him. I'm not sure exactly what kind of crab they were. They weren't king crab but the next best thing. Basically it was all you can eat because when I had all I could take down there was a lot of it still available. Delicious. Talk to you tomorrow.

Drew

~~August 1
 Good morning.  It's morning time for me.  1:53 am.  I'm  writing about yesterday.  I'd call it good fishing.  Nothing crazy, just steady scratch fishing for most of the day.  Same old grade, 14-22 pounders.  Same basic grounds.  It was a lot more fun than that sounds though.  Come on, good fishing on a good grade of fish.  What more could we ask for?  Better weather? OK.  But sometimes you get wind.  When life gives you lemons...  Seriously though, we had a whole lot of wind today.  Here's the thing though.  The boat drifted great.  We may have had over 20 knots of wind, but the boat drifted like we had 10.  A little wind burn and some chapped lips is all.  As long as the fish bite and no one gets hurt.

 Good fishing or not, we decided to take a break from that wind this afternoon.  We made a little move where the wind gets blocked by The Island.  What a difference.  I compared it to sitting in a spa.  Just that, aaahhhhhhhhh feeling.  We even caught some fish.  There were some spots of YT's up and at dark we caught 4 grouper, a halibut and a tail on a drift.  Then we anchored up for Seabass and had dinner.  We haven't caught a Seabass yet but we're hoping at or just before daylight we get some.  One boat had some around these parts yesterday.

 So that's it.  We'll be here again tomorrow.  20 minutes left on my watch and I'll be going back to bed for a few more hours.  Stay classy everyone and thanks for stopping by.
       

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July 11
 The morning started off so promisingly. We had plans to haul butt down to the lower grounds where there had been some good kelping but we got stopped short. The setup was epic. We had a 1-2 degree water temp break, and we were instantly catching fish. They were mostly small yellowfin. There was a sprinkling of 15-20+ pound tuna in there but most were throwbacks. But it felt like the school of straight bigs was right off the bow. We found a nice kelp and caught a dozen nice yellows and some more of that small tuna with a sprinkle, and again, we felt like it was soon coming. It never came. We stayed very busy but unfortunately it was mostly that throwback yellowfin. Eventually we gave up on what we thought was our honey hole and we never found much else the rest of the day. The lower zone produced enough for the couple boats that were down there so we're going to start down there tomorrow.

 

 

 

The weather was great most of the day. It got a bit breezy late but hopefully that comes down tomorrow.
 

~~July 2
  Good evening everyone. We're out fishing again on a wonderful 2 day trip. That means we fished this afterrnoon and we have all day tomorrow. I was pretty pumped when we left the dock. The bluefin reports were good and the local guys were catching yellowfin close to home. We got a pretty good load of bait and took off on the hunt. We got the goose egg today. The very unfortunate 0. It was definitely a time of day thing because we saw a couple schools and plenty of loose fish, they just wanted nothing to do with us this afternoon. We're going to gather ourselves and get set up on the bluefin grounds tonight and hopefully make up for today tomorrow.

 The weather today was great and as always we hope for the same tomorrow. Also I love our new electronics. Wait till you see it.

Nov. 12

Today was spent fishing our way north. We started in the dark where passenger Matty hooked the mystery fish that spooled him. We then headed north and found ourselves on the bottom end of the ridge where we got the last passenger who didn't have a wahoo a nice one. Now everyone on board has at least one skin. There was a nice school of nice yellowfin there but we couldn't get one of them to bite. Conditions were good, they just wouldn't hit. We then headed north. The next spot produced another nice wahoo but lacked anything else to go with it so we headed north. Right when the sun was going down and after it was down we hit a school of yellowfin that bit until dinner. We tried a couple more spots after dinner for nothing and are now headed north in good weather. All that northerly travel today left us some time to fish tomorrow and it will be spent trying for more wahoo and some yellowtail fishing. Yellowtail is the one species we don't have a lot of this trip so hopefully we'll use a few tags on those tomorrow.

Drew

Sep. 17

Our morning started off at 4:30. There was some good meter life on the first spot we looked at so we woke everyone up to try it and we had it figured out in the first 45 minutes. A few good grade yellows and a whole lot of smaller ones so we brought the lines in and continued down. An hour later we tried another spot for some more nice yellows but not enough so we continued down. The next spot a couple hours later was a disappointment. Not much yellowtail and not much wahoo. We got one wahoo almost to gaff before it spit the hook and swam away. So we continued down. The next spot we tried produced one beautiful wahoo and showed pretty decent sign of good grade yellowtails that didn't bite like you'd think. We caught some but it didn't keep us anchored up till sunset so we continued down. 1:30 hours later we were anchored up on our last spot of the evening and again it showed pretty good sign of yellows that bit pretty good for us up until dark. It was good enough to stay put and try it in the morning. We might of caught 1 million dorado today. I lost track at around one hundred and three but it might have been around 1 million. Unfortunately most of these dorado weren't much bigger then a neck tie and we let most go to fight another day. The weather was windy today. Wind and swell but for some reason it wasn't bad fishing weather. Maybe because our usual direction we worked was down but even when we would slide on a jig strike we never took any mean snaps. The wind came down after the sun went down so we're hoping it stays down.

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Captain Steve Gawitt just called in with an update from Aztec with an offshore update from San Diego. This morning on our first drift put 24 Bluefin Tuna, 2 Yellowfin Tuna, and 1 Yellowtail on the deck. We are seeing bigger Bluefin Tuna and we have had a fair amount of missed fish.

The Aztec is running Overnight trips departing from Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay. You can call (619) 224-3383 to get in on the action.

Tommy Rothery tied up his Polaris Supreme after the Eric Rogger five-day charter. Rothery weighed the fish while Bill Roecker interviewed chartermaster Rogger near the scales. "Tommy burned a lot of fuel looking around," said Eric. "We got some real quality yellowtail." A sardine on the dropper loop enticed the first-place fish for Gil Suizo of Chatsworth, who reeled it in after a ten-minute scrap. "He fought hard," said Gil. "I sweat a bit bringing him in; there were lots of seals around." Gil said he used a ringed 4/0 super Mutu hook, 50-pound P-Line, an Avet SX-2 reel and a Calstar 660 rod. Dan Hendrickson of Chatsworth took second place for a 34-pounder, and Phillip Bruce of Ramona got a 32.2-pound yellowtail that was good for third place.