Waterpup  

Short story, fishing was TOUGH!

Long story

Met up with Dave and Jake at the Harbor Island Sheraton in San Diego on Friday. With high expectations we knew that it could only take one fish off a paddy or from the Coronado Islands to win this. We knocked down a few beers and headed into the Captains meeting to register and had a few more beers.

Maybe 7:15 and time to get the boat in the water, get geared up, have a few more beers and ready for lines in at 5:30Am. Eventually we make it to a can in the San Diego Bay, tie off and bed down at 11:30 for the 3:00AM alarm. Dave has a center console so it’s not like waking up would be a problem but I was worried I’d sleep at all with my anticipation for the next day so high. Next thing I know my phone alarm is going off and it seemed as though I had just laid down, sleeping was not a problem.

Off we go to get bait at 3:15AM and out of the harbor at 3:30AM headed for the north island. Got there at 4:30AM and had to wait an hour before we could put a line in the water. That was hard to do!! When the lines in announcement came it was game on and straight business at that point but the plan was to spend only 30 minutes there and if nothing bit we’d head out an look for kelp paddies holding the target species. This being a Yellowtail tourney made any tuna caught a “by-catch” but it was a by-catch I’d be ok with.

The island showed no love, water was dirty and 66 degrees. No good for Yellowtail, offshore we go on the hunt. During this time the water warmed only a little here and there, we saw a lot of kelp paddies but no one was home when we came a knock’n. Radio chatter had only a couple YT reported and catching was mostly slow across the entire fleet. With the temp charts showing cooler water south of us and ALL the other boats there we decided to head a little north where the warmer water had showed. Read the rest of this entry »