mi steelhead Fishing Report 2025

I have three more fishing opportunities on the Apollo. Berkley will sponsoring three overnight Channel Island trips. These will be sea bass and rock fish type adventures. There will be give aways and raffles on board compliments of Berkley and Pure Fishing. Everyone will receive goodies for fishing. The dates will be: Friday April 3rd, Friday May 1st, and Sunday May 17th. To book a spot please contact Sea Landing (Truth Aquatics) at (805) 568-0460.

~~Sep. 14
 Well, we got our tail on today.  We started up there and caught a few, then we went there and had a couple of real nice drifts.  Good tailing on medium sized yellows.  We'll call them 12-14 pounders with a few smaller and a some in the 16 pound range.  We were completely OK with them. I spent my whole time there in the pit with my butt in the air stapling tags on the customers fish while the rest of the crew were gaffing.  After a couple good drifts, and I mean good ones, the fish stopped biting.  No one knows why, they just quit biting so we had to make a move again.  Now if I had remembered there was a Charger game on at that moment it would've been a great time to listen to it being we were making a 3 hour move.  But I forgot all about it.  I was too busy thinking of our next move and the future moves of this trip.  It was a good game too.  If you weren't paying attention we beat the 2014 super bowl champs.  !0 point under dogs.  Beat them up.  That's right Seattle.  Look out nation.

 We didn't catch much when we arrived to our new hot zone.  A couple of handfuls of nice yellowtails and then it got dark so now we sit on anchor.  We can safely fish one more day here before the storm pushes us out of here.  Which direction we'll go?  I'm not sure yet.
          

Capt Matt and the boys are engaged with a school of bluefin. They currently have 7 on deck and few more hanging. The fish they have landed so far are 25-35 lbs. I’m sure the big boys are watching and waiting for their opportunity to bite someone’s light line. Come prepared with a 25 lb setup a 40 lb setup and a setup capable of landing a fish over 100 lbs. the variety of available fish sizes creates a bit of a pickle but trust me when I tell you. You want to use heavier than needed equipment rather than the opposite.

Aug. 21
    Judging by how our trip has been so far, if you would have told me we would have 6 bluefin as of 1:00 this afternoon I wouldn't have believed you.  But sure enough, those darn bluefins were laughing at us.  We saw plenty of them but they didn't give two you know whats about us.  Our buddy Brian on the Spirit Of Adventure called us and told us he was seeing the 30-50 pound grade around where he was so we took a little ride down there.  It wasn't really biting that well until we got there.  Again our timing is on.  For the next few hours it was game on.  It actually took a while to get them to bite but during the best of it I couldn't get the balloon rigs out fast enough.  They were snapping!!  We ended up with a couple rounds of the 30-50 pounders with one going around 90 pounds and we also got a handful of 30-35 pound yellowfin there as well.  

    After it dried up we went looking for another.  We found several schools but none that would hang around and bite our baits.  Around 6:30 we bumped into another school that stuck and we picked up 21 more of those beauts.  And now we drift and do it again tomorrow.  

    The chefs are getting better and better at there sushi spread.  This afternoon it was terrific and I'm pretty sure I heard it's veal chops for dinner tonight.  Sweet dreams.
                                

 

The Bluefin started biting before sunrise and like a broken record, more than their share got away, we went 10 for about 25 on the 45-55 pound Bluefin, the hot ticket being the flatfall. After sunrise, the plump Yellowfin bit for several hours, being caught primarily on flylined 20 pound.

The first annual Ocean Tackle Research trip aboard Polaris Supreme returned with skipper Tom Rothery and chartermaster Lon Mikkelsen November 19. The ten-day trip had 20 anglers. "We caught a lot of variety and had good fishing," said Mikkelsen, from Hood River, OR. "We also caught a lot of 40-pound Humboldt squid. The best fishing was on kelp paddies in the warmer water. "We're testing some new OTR jigs," he continued, "and they got bit." Rothery weighed the contenders on the Fisherman's landing certified scales. Clint Campbell of Bozeman, MT won first place for a 65.95-pound wahoo he caught ona silver and pink Raider jig. He said he used 40-pound P-Line, a Daiwa Saltist 30 reel and a Seeker Black Steel 6470 rod. Jon Collins of Menifee won second place for a 52.6-pound skin that bit a pink Catchy Tackle bomb. Collins brought his son into the photo to show off a big dorado. Randy Walker of Huntington Beach was third, for a 48-pound wahoo that snapped up a gold Raider.

Aug 11

I'm not sure how i feel about today. I know at 3:30 I felt real bad. Extremely frustrated to say the least. 2 of the boats we were fishing with found schools early in the morning and drifted with it most of the day scratching away at the bluefin the whole time while we drove around seeing nothing. The other 2 boats we were with connected around 1:00 in the afternoon and were gettin um, so I was feeling sad and mad. I told Mark to switch gens and broke out the volt meter to see if we had a short somewhere. I figured there had to be a reason we were the only boat not drifting. We were looking in the same water with the same machines trolling the same jigs but just not seeing it. The truth of the matter is there was nothing wrong with the boat, her captain or the crew. Sometimes your just that guy. Sometimes your front row and sometimes your nose bleed.

OK, enough wining. The day turned out just fine. At 3:30 we found a boomer school and drifted on the 25-45 pound bluefin almost till dark. Everyone caught at least one with top dog Phil boating 6 of those beauts. The weather was great in the morning but increased wind velocity throughout the day and it was pretty choppy at dark. So with the weather coming up and our bait situation worsening, we're heading down to fish for yellows and try for some macks.

~~Sep 13
 Thank goodness for slow speed.  Even though we got a really good jump yesterday, we weren't going to be getting anywhere down below till late tomorrow.  Our speed was horrible.  1.5 knots below average.  But we sped up this morning.  Yup.  This morning we were only making .75 knots below average.  That all costs a whole lot of time when you're traveling great distances so we decided we'd have to be stopping short.  So that's what we did this afternoon, arriving at 4:30.

 Wow!  It didn't take long before everyone had a tuna on.  And they weren't those 8-14 pounders either.  There were some of those, but the majority of them were those 20-30 pounders.  I say again, "wow".  It bit steady the whole time we which is a couple of hours.  During the stop, I had tied a few hooks and cast a few baits out, you know , like we do, and quite a few times the hook would fall off and I would scratch my head and ask myself, " are my knots failing"?  They weren't.  It took crew member Justin to spot a wahoo flying out of the water to figure it out.

 So we wound them in and threw back the marauders.  Before dark, which wasn't long, we had a little binger for 5 and then one for 1 50 pounder.  Say it with me now.  "Wow"!  We aren't going anywhere tonight.  We'l just kick back and see what the day has to offer.

 My buddy Glen caught the 50 pound wahoo today.  Every year for a while now he has been the last member of the little troll team that I like to call, " the troll of shame"  That's the last few people on board who have not yet caught a wahoo.  He will not be joining that team this year.  Nope.  This year he can join the heckling party.  He get's to see what it's like from the other side.  Way to go Glen.