for rockport texas Fishing Report 2024

The Annual SFR charter aboard the Apollo with Captain J.J Gerritsen and crew was a big success !! The Apollo is running out of Sea Landing on beautiful Santa Barbara Harbor, the closest harbor to the outer Channel Islands. Great weather meant an ideal cruise over to San Miguel Island for some of the finest shallow water rockfishing you'll find anywhere. 300 feet down you say, maybe 200, how about 100 feet ? No way. The offshore terrain around San Miguel is so rugged and marked with underwater pinnacles, we spent most of the day fishing in 25 to 90 feet of water. Lighter rigs, jigs, leadheads and swimbaits were the order of the day, and the San Miguel rockfish were in a hungry mood. We started catching fish before daybreak and spent the rest on the trip hauling up huge reds, chuckles and lings, all sporting some of the most vibrant colors I've seen on any fish in a long time. Awesome day!! We limited out on huge rockfish, slammed about 50-60 grumpy whitefish, 5-6 huge goats and 16 or so pre-historic looking lings before calling it a trip. Epic day !!!! The jackpot was a nail biter as Shawn Suhr's huge lingcod and Art Moralez's giant goat battled to a near dead heat. Captain J.J needed to come down and settle the score, with the final vote went going to Shawn's 12-13 pound ling. Great job Shawn. Captain J.J and his crew did an awesome job as always and the Apollo is looking as spotless as ever. The Apollo will be in Santa Barbara till around mid May before moving down to Fisherman's Landing in San Diego. Call Sea Landing at 1-805-963-3564 or log onto www.apollocharters.com for their schedule. Great trip everyone !!!. email me at [email protected] for any photos. Thats the word on the water. Don

 The big ones are hitting good today! 60-80 pounders! Some creeping over the 100 pound mark! Got to love it! We sure are! 

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

Hi friends. Well, the morning started out pretty well for us. Got an early wake up from Riddler after an all night freeze in our crew staterooms. The new A/C works too well. We all slept in socks and sweaters and were still freezing. We felt like Sinka in "Cool Runnings" when John Candy throws him in the ice cream truck to simulate what the temperature would be like for their bobsled race. Anyhow, with The Outfields "Use Your Love" stuck in my head, we started hooking some bluefin tunas in the 50 lb. range, give or take a few pounds, and we managed to boat six of those beauties. A good start to our morning but that was it for our day on the BFT. Nice to see 'em, but not a whole lot of substance to it, so we continued on our journey south.

Throughout the day, we stopped on multiple kelp paddies for a few handfuls of quality 14-25 lb. yellows and we even snagged a few 18 lb. yellowfin tuna as well, so that was sweet. We didn't have a banner day by any means but we scratched a decent day out of it and everyone had a shot at a quality offshore gamefish. With that, we didn't see a whole lot to keep us offshore so we'll be heading elsewhere to try and locate some sabas (greenback mackerel) and some yellowtail as well. We'll be in the zone around 23:45 hours and the passengers are downstairs enjoying barbecue ribs, corn, and cherry pie.

Just a quick bit of news before I sign off: fishing in the day and a half range picked up late in the day on bluefin tuna. Good scores for the guys and granted we're further south than those guys, we're keeping our eyes on that developing situation. Be sure to check our schedule as we have a couple of day and a half trips on the schedule.

So that is all. Weather is chilly but the sea state is plenty fine. We'll be at it here in a few hours so we better get some sleep. Take care.

19 bluefin 6 yellowfin 22 bonito 1 yellowtail. Encouraging sign for our first day back offshore.