South wind and swell had me a little on edge as it was probably borderline on how comfortable we would be. Plan B was to launch in the SD Bay and look for Butts and check out Tim's new boat on the water.
Man, we were planning on running up to get bait as Eric really wanted to drift with Sardines to give us a hopeful better edge in finding our quarry. We get out into the bay and Terns are diving everywhere, fish busting the surface and bait jumping everywhere! What a great sight to see again as I don't remember seeing so much life all year out there!
Eric was using his "East Coast" flounder rigs and techniques while I stuck with the old stand byes. I even pulled out the fish counter as the numbers started to grow exponentially.
Fits fish on board..
Mackerel were everywhere, and they were the bigger models! We didn't try for them, but they would inhale our plastics at times.
Early in the session and I score my first butt! Only issue was that it was just short....
We catch like 20 bass, macks and a butt before we decided to just make the run and get bait. The fog was rolling in also which made things quite cool and the south wind started to pick up.
We got some healthy sized sardines and went back to hit up my usual AO's and see what we could find. Only issue was there were 2-4 boats exactly where I usually fish in every spot, so apparently the cat is out of the bag.
Then my boat started to run a little rough. We both weren't quite sure why it was running like this but both decided let's head further back and stay closer to the ramp just in case anything happens.
Of course, the birds were no longer there... nor the bait or fish... but there were 4 boats fishing tight together right at my numbers, so we took a look at some other parts of the bay. We tried avoiding spots that would have spotties and mud bottoms with no eel grass to get good clean drifts.
We saw Tim roll right by us and never noticed it was us. LOL
We called him on the radio and Eric had a good laugh because he couldn't believe the names that I called people... He couldn't believe I called Steve, Sasquatch and just cracked up when I grabbed the radio and said "Cyclops, Cyclops, are you out there Tim? This is the Curmudgeon, come back". Eric just got a kick out of it for some reason.
We had quite a few short bites from bass and halibut, but we picked up another 3 flatties. Of course, I had one I totally thought was legal, but was 0.10" short. lol
The sardines were big and all around 7" and some maybe even 8". This should of got us some nice butts, but the little guys were even doing their best at trying to get them inhaled.
So we caught about 3 dozen fish today, but that terrible tide really made things die out. We did see a big something or other slam the surface hitting bait. Never got a good look, but only caught the tail end of it.
Wind got bad, floating grass got bad, so we decided to call it the day and head back to barn. While grabbing our "Yellowtails", we noticed a big old nasty pod on it's tail. Nasty little creatures!
That was it. A fun day on the water, but I need to get Eric on a big Halibut. He really wants something in the double digits before he leaves!
Thanks for reading!
