west branch angler Fishing Report 2025

27 yellowfin 21 bluefin 27 yellowtail. Shoulder and belly hooked baits work best when fishing picky tuna. The second picture shows where to place your hook. The baits pictured are also a prime example of what a bad bait looks like, taking your time and selecting a good healthy bait will get you more bites.

Aug 13
 Oh how quick game plans can change out here.  Hello all and welcome back.  Or welcome me back.  Or... What was the question?  Never mind.  I'm back.  I had a wonderful trip off.  Spent a lot of time with my daughter.  She got much cuter in the last month and also became much more of a terror.  All joy though.

 When we left the dock this afternoon I felt pretty good about my game plan.  Go fish yellows for a day or two, then come catch tuna for the last couple of days.  We caught over a hundred tuna today on our departure day.  Good ones too.  20-40 pounders minus one 20 fish stop on small yellowfin.  Well that just threw a wrench in my whole plans.  I'm not whining though.  We're very grateful for what we caught today.  Not every boat in this ocean caught fish today.  So we're going to take it one day at a time now.  Hopefully we can do this again tomorrow.
      

July 27
    Todays saying for the fleet fishing with us was "you should of been here yesterday".  We fished in yesterdays hot yellowfin zone and it pretty much stunk.  It was one of those mornings when you wake up to find 30 boats in one little area and an hour or two later you don't see another boat because we all panic and split up to find where the fish swam off to because they're sure not here.  We had one kelp in the morning that had a good amount of tuna on it but it didn't bite well.  We were getting them one at a time for a little bit before it quit.  After that we didn't catch another tuna until after 5 PM.  We found a little stretch of water there that kept our interest up.  We started getting jig strikes. We found a kelp where we caught a nice little bit of tuna on and found an area of breaking fish that wouldn't bite.  We were stopping the boat until dark.  

    The weather was great today.  We're going to head down and fish the coast for yellowtails tomorrow.
                                    

Sien On and his charter group got a quick shot in the bottom of the ninth. They landed 31 yellowfin 8 yellowtail 2 bonito. A small hook and 20lb fluorocarbon got most of the bites.

July 19
    Today was a bust for us.  I can't sugar coat it any.  It was slow all around.  We chased around fish all morning but we never really saw much volume in one area.  The fish were scattered out one here two there for miles.  We'd stop and maybe get one or two per drift but it wasn't enough to keep us around.  We left and went to the next Island up arriving after lunch.  After looking around for a while we found one spot that I think we would have done well on if there were no such things as sea lions.  The yellows boiled around and we hooked seven or eight of them and they were all stolen from us by our furry little friends.  After that we took off and fished offshore the rest of the day and only caught a handful of tuna.

    The weather right now is good and we should have it tomorrow as well.  We're going to copy our first morning out here and hopefully have similar results.
                                

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.