mokelumne river Fishing Report 2025

July 30
    We had a great day.  Of course the morning had us worried.  We started in the day befores hot spot and it was ice cold.  I felt disgusted but what we do in those situations as a group of boats is find them and that's what happened so in the afternoon we had a couple very good drifts on yellowfin tuna.  Our first drift was at 2:00 after lunch and it was a long plunker bite of 1-3 going at a time.  After that we already had a good day and a good trip.  We had the whipped cream and the nuts but I wanted the cherry so after an hour or so of hard looking we found our sun downer school.  It was a little more fast paced this time and it lasted almost until sunset on the yellowfin and well past dark for the 3 bluefin we hooked.  They were 50-80 pounds estimated.  We'll find out at the scale tomorrow.  They'll make jack pot go quickly because I'll only need to weigh 3 fish.
    
    The weather today was fantastic.  We're headed in and we'll be dockside tomorrow at 7:00 in the AM.  I'll be handing the keys over to Tommy and I'm finally going home for the first time this season.  I'm looking forward to getting to know my baby again who will be turning 4 months this Saturday.
                            

July 7

Today was kind of a disapointing day for me. I had plans of having good fishing in the morning at Cedros then heading to Benitos and having descent fishing there. Well the water got funky on us due to the big south swell that was pushed up from the tropical storm that rode it's way up. It was a green green green and the yellows didn't like it. They were still there like they had been for the last week but they didn't bite well. After 4 1/2 hours we gave up on it and went with plan b. We arrived at Benitos after lunch and I will say we saw a good amount of fish all over the island. The problem was the sea lion population. Those things are out of control right now. It's wierd how it works at that island. Sometimes they're tolerable and sometimes they're not. Today they were not. We're headed back to Cedros now and we'll give it another chance tomorrow. This south swell seemed to back off some late today so hopefully there is some strong current through the night tonight to flush all that icky water out of there.

I just reread what I wrote and it sounds worse than it was. We scratched out an ok day. We averaged over 3 fish per rod. Compared to the last week it was slow but back up further and we had a stellar day. See you tomorrow.

~~Sept. 3
        I slept in this morning.  Travel day.  I awoke at 5:00 and went straight to the
computer to see if we'll be bluefin fishing tomorrow or yellow-finning up.  Bluefin
it is.  10 knot flags out there all day tomorrow.  Nice.  So we didn't fish at all
today.  No reason to.  We traveled through 4 other boat wakes from yesterday and
they didn't stop the boat so we weren't going to cost us tomorrows fishing time to
try and prove them wrong.  I trust our code boats.  The weather traveling up has
been ideal all day long.  The passengers did what they do, movies, books, and
relaxation while the crew took it easy and did some chores at a reasonable pace.
We did a lot of organizing of things.  We went through crates and boxes and nuts
and washers and bolts and things like that and just made sense of it all.  The crew
even got around to detailing our beautiful teak rails.

        The bluefin reports sounded good today so we're excited about getting up there for
a couple of days to finish up the trip.  We'll either spend 2 days blue-finning or
we'll do 1 day here and go get our yellowfin on for the last day.  I'm not sure.
That's what's so exciting about it all!
I may not sleep well tonight I'm so excited.  Maybe it's because the 1.5 hour after
lunch nap I took and/or all the coffee I've drunken since then.  Not because I'm
tired, I just love coffee.  I'm kidding.  I'm sure I'll sleep fine.  I've been doing
this a long time.

        My daughter turned 5 months yesterday.  People say the time flies and they're
right.  It sure does.

Steady stop and go action on school grade yellowfin. 59 yellowfin tuna 1 yellowtail. Private charter tomorrow tomorrow then back to open party on Monday.