northwest river Fishing Report 2024

FANTASTIC 1.5 TRIP WITH CAPT. J.J.!!!! APOLLO just came back in with 24 anglers brought in 26 Yellowtail(ranging 22 lbs to 30 lbs), 78 Lings, & limits of Rockfish. Next available trips will be Feb 2nd & 16th. Book now before it's too late. Call Fisherman's Landing @ (619)221-8500 to get your reservation.

6 Bluefin Tuna and 8 Yellowtail. Amazing opportunity to catch a fish of a lifetime. Trips are $175 per person(starting Monday) and limited to 44 pass. Please bring a 25 lb bait rod, a 40 or 50 lb bait rod and a flatfall outfit. No passport required.

July 24

Good evening everyone. Today was more of the same as the last couple days. Still seeing tons of fish. Still struggling to get bites. Same thing. See a school, stop and catch fish one at a time. The cool thing about it is we're stopped fishing a lot more then regular fishing days so we're staying occupied. The only thing different for us today was that we saw multiple schools of big bluefin. The 50-80 pound stuff but it's even harder to get one of those to bite. We ended up hooking a few and landing a couple of 70 pounders. We'll do it again for one more day, the last fishing day of this trip. Hopefully they'll want to bite better tomorrow. There is no way we would leave this zone with all the fish we are seeing.

Again another scratch fishing day with the usual mix of yellowtail, yellowfin, bluefin, albacore and dorado. No big numbers, we just scratched away. We spent the morning in the tuna area and mid morning to the end of the day we went looking for kelps and caught and released a lot of small dorado. The weather again has been excellent.

The most interesting thing is that everybody is getting albacore strikes anywhere they go. We are hoping the water will cool off in the next week and the albacore will start to group up and bite. Chef Jeff is still serving up some great food. An open faced steak sandwich for lunch and dinner was a superb cajun yellowtail filet and shrimp grilled with bell peppers and onions, served with fresh yellow squash, zuchinni and mushrooms and wild rice. It was really good. It looks like Alijos and the Ridge are starting off good. The crew and I are anxious to get down on a longer trip for some of those bigger yellowfin and wahoo. We still have a couple open spots on our 9-day departing August 28. And if your looking more into the future, Larry Brown still has some openings on his 10 day on October 25th. So come out and join me and the crew.

We'd love to have you on board.

Thanks, Tommy

~~Oct. 23
 Remember yesterday when I said we would find our dorado kelp?  Well we conquered that quest.  I tell no lies.  An hour or so after breakfast, maybe 2, we found a kelp loaded and we went to battle and overall I think we won.  I mean we caught exactly what we wanted.  Beautiful mahi mahi.  After that we went back to travel mode and we'll be arriving to our slip in San Diego tomorrow at 0800 hours.  We ate some of that mahi for dinner tonight while we watched a slide show of all the pictures taken this trip presented to us by Tommy.  Everyone misses there wives and they all told me, "Drew, I couldn't spend another minute without my wife".  That's why this trip was 15 days.  It's the maximum amount of time we can spend without our wives.

 So we tie up tomorrow and that's the way we'll stay until November 9th, when we'll be departing on a 10 day trip.  So until then, I'd just like to say how much I'll miss writing to you all.  Stay classy and thanks for stopping by, but mostly, stay classy.
         

Aug. 15
    We started our morning off in the local bluefin zone.  We caught 12 of them, 2 of them being the 50+ pounders while the rest were that beautiful manageable 30-40 pound fish and we caught a few yellowfin.  On drift number 2 we hooked and lost one.  Do to the amount of boats thinking the same thing we were and the lack of fish I was seeing being brought over the rail, I decided to leave early and look for yellowfin for a while.  It wasn't long before we found some, and then some more, and then some more.  It pretty much was like that for as long as we fished it which was until after 5 when we went back to the zone where we started.  We had good fishing pretty much all day long.  The only negative thing about it was the grade of fish was a bit on the smaller side.  They weren't runts but they weren't great either.  12 pounds is the short version.  They averaged out to be 12 pounders.  We looked all around for a bigger grade but it pretty much was what it was.  I did think that the area we finished up in yellowfin wise had quite a few more 20 pounders mixed in than what we'd been fishing so it may be something to look at tomorrow.  We finished up right where we started and we had a long 2 1/2 hour drift.  We caught a yellowfin every once in a while, we landed 4 of the 30-40 pound bf's and caught 1 70ish pounder and lost at least 4 of those.  We are going to drift tonight and do it again tomorrow.
                                

 

Captain Mike Pritchard called in this afternoon with an update from the Tribute. We are having very good Yellowfin Tuna just South of San Clemente Island. There is a mix of Yellowfin Tuna, Skipjack, and Dorado. We have 180 Yellowfin Tuna and they are biting on everything. The Tribute is running offshore trips out of Seaforth Landing you can call them at (619) 224-3383 or you can book online at www.tributesportfishing.com.

~~Aug. 28
 It was a busy morning for us today but a kick back afternoon. For the second time this year we are not fishing on our departure day. We did the usual turn around throwing in an oil and fuel filter change. We offloaded, then onloaded and then we took off before lunch. The bait was OK. It looked great but lost some scales putting it in our tanks. We'll see how it likes 80+ degree water in a couple of days. I decided to skip this 30 mile yellowfin zone today and get down below while we have a window of good hurricaneless weather. There will be some wind the next couple of days everywhere but should come down nicely for a week or so everywhere if the forecast holds true. I'm still not sure where we're starting yet this trip. We'll either head straight to the rocks or drag our feet for a day and wait for the weather to get pristine. For now there is some napping going on and just some old fashioned kicking back. Something we haven't seen a whole lot of this year as it has been straight to fishing out of the gates.