pathfinder Fishing Report 2025

We spent our last day looking at school after school of albacore. A very good sign of no biting fish. Frustrating? Yes. Oh well. That's just how it goes sometimes. A very good trip in all. Thanks to everyone on board and to the charter master Wayne Martin with Catchy Tackle lures. We'll be rolling back out tomorrow on another 5 day trip. Stay tuned.

Often times the very FIRST piece of the puzzle is the most difficult to locate. Today we stopped on multiple small schools of yellowtail that were surprisingly hard to hook. Full size yo-yo jigs on 40 lb mono produced the first 2 yellowtail of our season. We also spent a couple hours fishing the bottom to assure everyone had plenty of white meat. We’re hoping this is just the tip of the iceberg. Make those resos !

27 yellowfin(20-60lbs) 16 yellowtail 2 dorado. The anglers who were willing to change their bait out every 60 seconds were rewarded with beautiful grade yellowfin tuna. Belly and shoulder hooked baits on 30-50lb line and a small circle hook worked best.

Today we spent the day in the crows nest looking for kelps. We had 73 degree water and flat seas . We were able to find some nice kelp patties with some Dorado and a few Wahoo on them. Nice little hits of action through out the day. Tomorrow we will be at Guadalupe Island to try for trophies. Here we have Gary with a great kelp patty Dorado on the light line! Also here is Mark with his first wahoo of the trip!

Today was mostly a travel day. We check around for albacore but the fish were down. The wind picked up this afternoon but we are good south so the ride is fine. This is our second day out on an eight day trip. So we have plenty of time to find the fish.

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.
                                

 

Oct. 10

Another travel day today so another day with nothing to report. I enjoyed a nice sleeping in this morning, then ate some cereal, then cleaned an engine room along with Mark and Jed. I noticed there were some movies being played and naps being had. We're going to try our hands at some squid in the early a.m. hours to give us a little more to fish with tomorrow. We're getting in the bluefin mode tomorrow for our last day before we return to San Diego.

Mr. Joe G. Yes you Joe. I am truly sad to say that tomorrow is our last chance to catch an albacore before we square up our bet. Unfortunately even if there was a miracle and we did find a biting school I don't think we could get a hundred to make you a winner in our bet so make sure you have that bill clean and crisp. I know you know but I would have loved to lose that bet. Thankfully we had the bluefin this year covering for the albacore so we were still in good shape for the summer. Fall is here and they're still biting. Timing is everything.