horace caldwell pier Fishing Report 2025

July 28
    Today we had about as good of yellowtail fishing as you can get.  Quality to quantity ratio, holy Toledo.  18-25 pound fish and they were biting pretty much as full speed as yellows bite for a couple hours and after that it slowed down but they were still biting well for a couple more.  If you have read my past reports you know that surface iron fishing on big yellows is my favorite kind of fishing and it was pretty much wide open on the surface iron.  Holy Toledo!  I'm not the only one who felt this way either.  We have a Polaris Supreme first timer on board, his name is Josh and he may love it more then me.  He named his dog after a surface iron.  Tady.  How cool is that?  We've had a tank of mackerel on board for about 3 weeks and we finally let them go today.  On hooks that is before getting eaten by yellows.  In the late afternoon ewe looked for bait and found some a couple hours before dark and caught a tank full of nice mackerel.  We restocked our supply.  We made a couple drifts along a kelp line while the sun set and tugged on a few calico bass and now we're headed up to fish tuna tomorrow.  Sweet dreams.
                            
    Oh yeah, Happy Anniversary to Renee.  I think you know who that's from Renee.
                    

 

Wednesday, April 24th, 2012

Hi friends. Starting off the day, we were expecting rain if not when we woke up but for sure around the mid-morning time. Captain Drew told me to expect work at 0700 hours this morning and that he would call me if he was going to call off the day. At about 0615 hours, my phone rang and when I saw that my phone read "Incoming call: Drew Henderson", I nearly trampled my girlfriend to reach for the phone and hear those beautiful words of "don't come to work today". Well, Drew being the awesome boss that he is just wanted to remind me that work was still on. Disappointed is an understatement. He specifically said that he would only call to let me know that we were NOT to come into work. I reluctantly suited up for work, still a little peeved that my vision of sleeping in and an all-day couch marathon was switched back to 7-11 coffee, 5-hour energies, and arthritic hands by days end.

Now some of you might be asking "Richie. Why so grumpy about going to work?" Well, after Tuesday's primer coat application, the primer creates what is called "orange peel".The entire hull looks like a giant, white orange peel and to rid ourselves of this orange peel, what must one do to smooth it out and get prepped for the final gloss coat? If you guessed "more sanding" then yes, you are correct. From 0700 until 1630 hours on Wednesday, we had to re-sand the entire boat with 220-grit sand paper to smooth everything out. Oh, how could I forget? We did all of this under beautiful, sunny skies. That weatherman is not our friend at the moment. He was wrong about the Wednesday morning/afternoon rain but he was correct about the rainfall on Wednesday evening in San Diego.

So here it is, Thursday morning and work was called off not only because of the rain but also to relieve sore, aching muscles as the constant use of both vibrating and orbital sanders took it's toll on Drew, Jed, Mark, Tommie, Jamie and myself from yesterday and we were given the day off. Thanks, Drew.

In all seriousness, there is a silver lining to all of my complaining of long days and sore bodies. All of the hard work that we put into the boat doesn't go un-noticed when we take a look at the boat right before the first trip of the season. The boat will look stunning and it will be a pleasure to keep her maintained throughout the years. When we have to put on our sunglasses to even stare at the hull and when you see your reflection perfectly in the boat, it's sweet justice to put so much time and effort into a project and to have it come out looking so beautiful. We can't wait to see how everyone will react when they first lay eyes on the new and improved Polaris Supreme.

Anyhow, I had some time to type out a nice, long report on our day off today. Weather permitting, we'll be back at it tomorrow to finish some touch-up sanding as we get ready for the final application of the gloss coat which probably will be scheduled for either Friday or Monday. We'll chat with you tomorrow and let you know how our day went.

-Richie & Team Supreme-

P.S. Sorry about no pictures lately. There really hasn't been anything picture-worthy in the past couple of days and the pictures I would've shot, you've seen before: all of us with sanders in our hands, gloves on, respirator masks, safety glasses and looking like giant powdered donuts. I'll send some shots with the completion of the gloss coat.

J. J. Gerritsen docked his Apollo at Fisherman's landing January 21 after a trip of a day and a half to the Colnett area. "We fished the high spots," he said, "when we saw really good sign of yellows on the sonar. We had good action on drifts for 26 yellowtail, most on yoyo jigs in blue and white or scrambled eggs color. "About 9:30 a.m. we moved into deeper water to rockfish on slow drifts. We had excellent ling cod fishing on lings up to 20 pounds. We got 78 of them, mostly on the dropper loop with sardines, but some on jigs, too. We filled out our limits with reds anmd some large bonito. There were a lot of bonito around, up to 14 pounds. "We also had a flurry of Humboldt squid, which hindered the yellowtail fishing until they left." J. J. said he would be running these trips every Friday night at right p.m. through the end of February.

June 30

We tried our hand at the elusive White Sea Bass today and that's exactly what they were. Elusive. We didn't see the life we were expecting to see. We covered a lot of ground today looking for them but we never found them. We caught some trophy calico bass at one spot and we tried and checked a couple traditional yellowtail hot spots for nothing. One plus thing about today for me is we fished most the day where I have never fished before in my 13 full seasons on this boat. Now I know why. The day wasn't a total loss though. We found an area that had a huge bird school in it but it went down by the time we got there but we know the conditions were much improved from a week ago so maybe tomorrow they'll be hitting. We may have just got there too late. With about an hour left of day light we hit a spot of those big big yellows and we caught quite a few of those before our day ended. And last but not least we ended with a 20ish pound seabass and a 20ish pound halibut. We will stay the night and try it where we are in the morning. It's good sleeping weather where we are. I may be sleeping with my thumb in my mouth tonight.

Captain Matt and the boys have come out of the gates firing. 70+ yellowtail out of their first stop. Stay tuned.

~~Oct. 24
 We fished today with all our buds.  Obviously it was the best game in town.  We had boats from San Diego up to Ventura all nestled in sharing the same honey hole.  15 of us to be exact.  It all worked out though.  It was a nice spread of fish.  Everyone was able to scratch.  Scratch, scratch, scratch.  From after daylight until after lunch.  Then things went dead for the most part, so we pulled anchor and found a nice school to drift on.  After a long drift the day was pretty much over.  We drove around, made another anchor job but the fish were done.  Just like us.  We're done for the week.  It's up to you whether or not we fish this next up coming weekend.  Halloween weekend.  See you there?

 Oh, the fish today were tuna.  Yellowfin.  Smaller.  We had a couple handfuls of 30-40 pounders first thing, but as soon as the current picked up, for some reason the bigguns split.  So we stayed busy with the smaller ones.  Veal.  Oh, and they found sardine again.  Loaded up.  So don't worry 10 dayers.
                         

Captain Ryan Bostian just called in with an update from The San Diego out of Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay. Today we had 33 Yellowtail (18 to 31 pounds) for 48 anglers. They fish were biting good in the morning on YoYo Iron. Then in the afternoon the surface action picked up. We are seeing lots of fish and things are looking good for the Coronado Islands. Call Seaforth Sportfishing or Book Online at the San Diego website to get in on the action.

Sep. 9

It was awesome yellowtailing this morning. As soon as we got to the grounds it was on and that time was dark 30. That's right. It wasn't even daylight yet and we were gettin um. Nice big fat yellows. As soon as daylight hit we were still gettin um and we kept gettin um for a few more hours too. And after that, we made a move and we were gettin um there too. So lunch time came around and Chef Shawn made yellowtail sandwiches and guess what, they were awesome. After that we worked up up up to get us in position for bluefining tomorrow. The weather coming up is not good. As I write this at the Charger halftime my legs are 6 feet apart for balance. Sometimes my butt is against the wall and I can barely reach the keyboard. The weather man is calling for better weather tomorrow. Should we believe him?