The plan was to fish the Cortez or Tanner Banks if the weather was good but the wind was blowing 20 knots on the banks so the plan was to fish the front side of San Clemente Island.
18 of us boarded the Fury about 7pm and we left the dock at 9pm. A hour stop at the bait barge to fill the tanks with 4-5 inch sardines. The second captain Sam gave us the safety speech and a low down of next day’s fishing.
We dropped the anchor just off the Nave base on the West end of San Clemente Island about 4am. At grey light a few started to fish with a blue/white surface iron being the hot ticket. Every cast brought back a short Calico.
We started working our way down the front side of the Island in beautiful clean blue water. Because of the bad weather on the tuna grounds we had a few boats from San Diego fishing the Island also and that helped keep the seal lions off us. Marcus the owner operator of the Fury was not happy with the current so we moved offshore for Rockfish. The wind was blowing and we had some trouble saying on the bottom but some people did get a few lingcod and nice Reds. Two huge seal lions found us and they were taking every nice fish so we went back to the Island.
Back at the Island Marcus found a little cove and dropped the anchor. Club member Junior Banda starts us off with a nice size yellowtail. Junior tags two more yellowtail before anybody else gets a yellowtail.
After a while the seals find us so we pull anchor and move on. This will be the plan for the rest of the day. We had a study pick for Calico Bass, barracuda, whitefish, sheephead and yellowtail all day. 90% of the calico and barracuda were too small to keep. The schools of yellowtail would come through and we get 2 or 3 hook ups and all the fish were 15-25 pounds.
The day ended anchored in a small cove where the crew tried to catch squid for bait while Sam cooked us a steak dinner.
Fish Count.
30 yellowtail 15-25 pounds with Jr Banda winning the JP with a 26.5 pound YT.
Val Handzus was the lady angler winner with a 16 pound YT.
25 keeper Calico, 15 keeper barracuda, 2 lingcod, 2 sheephead, 40 misc. rockfish.
