Report by Neil Richey
Saturday June 27th marked the FIB’ers first club charter of the 2016 fishing season. We went out of Dana Wharf Sportfishing on the Clemente with Skipper Chad. We were boarded and off to the bait barge promptly at 6am for our ¾ day charter. There was no line at the bait barge, and we quickly got our scoops of great looking anchovies with some sardines mixed in.
We made a left out of the harbor and headed south to the ¾ day zone where they had been seeing some Yellowtail action on the beach. The short drive to the first stop had great looking water, and the skipper was able to get up set up to make long fly line casts with the few sardines we had to the kelp edges in hopes of the early Yellowtail bite. This first spot, while yielding a pretty wide open Calico bass bite produced no Yellowtail, and only small bass.
Further south we headed, past the domes into the best of the ¾ day range zone. We pretty much stayed in this region, tighter to the kelp on the beach the rest of the day. The water was a warm 72 degrees, building swell, and great tidal movement. The surface was alive with Calico bass boils for the whole day. This zoned started producing legal Calicos from the start and while we never landed any monsters, it was the most consistent Calico bite the landing had seen so far. Everything got bit, of course bait, but also swimbaits, hardbaits, and surface irons. When you hooked a fish you would see wolfpacks of Calicos chasing the hooked fish. There was a handful of dedicated sardine long soakers determined to get the Yellowtail bite to turn on, sadly only one Yellowtail was caught on this trip by Brian Chichi, but soaking sardines did yield a consistently larger grade of Calico bass like our 4# Jackpot winner caught be Mike Ricigliano.
As the sun was getting lower everyone knew that the trip was coming to an end, and the skipper gave us the call to the barn. Most headed to the galley to rest their bones and talk about big missed bites, and how good the consistency was for a ¾ trip with a landing that is fairly new to our club. All in all there were no monsters, but just good fellowship and good fishing for our inaugural trip of the 2016 fishing season.