La Jolla Kelp - Plan B

[Latimeria]

Plan was to fish offshore for the local tuna that I've heard about, but my buddy had to back out so I prepped the Curmudgeon.  I know there was squid last week, so I decided to make it a real effort to find them, or at least mackerel for live bait.  I decided I wasn't bringing any cut or frozen bait and it would all be artificial unless I caught live stuff.

I searched for over an hour looking and probing the grounds for squid and mackerel.  Nothing... not an egg sack or a single mack to be found.  I saw clouds of wiggles with eyes on the meter, but they didn't even take the micro sabiki.

Marine weather was nice.  A decent number of boats and kayaks spread out all over La Jolla.  Good thing was they weren't bunched up, but it made trolling hard.



I trolled and searched for a few hours.  Some newbie in a Yum Yum yellow kayak was yelling really loud next to me "I got a Yellowtail".... "I got a WSB!" ... as his buddy was trying to keep up with him.  Sure enough, he had a WSB...  I didn't get a great view of how big it was, but I totally would have been happy with that.

Otherwise I scanned the crowd as I trolled deep diving rapalas and never saw a single rod bent over except for kayak guy.

With 2 hours left before I told myself I wanted to get out of there (Beat the Over the Line and Summer Crowd traffic), I decided to just switch it up and see what some of these clouds in LJ were.

Pretty, but also pretty small.



I switched to the weedless plastic and pulled out some Gulp Shrimp.  I figured I had to get something now!



I set spot lock up on a shallow hump and start whacking the bass



Then the New Seaforth rolls up and seriously drops anchor 75 feet from me.  They started brailing chum and there went my bite.  All the fish swam to their stern...  Grrrr....

I made the move because staying there would only eat at me more so I did a little searching.  The Gulp shrimp found them.... and I literally was going cast the swimbait and let it sink as I was reeling in a fish on the Gulp.

Every Gulp was a bottom critter.



Every swimbait was a bass and some really nice ones!







There's always one that messes with the order.  LOL





I pretty much lost count but think I got about 20 bass and 20 bottom critters in 2.5 hours.  (I stayed a little later than expected since the bite was pretty fun)

I also got a toad Sculpin





and a Cabbie!  I don't catch many of them around here.  I've caught them before a few times, but it's like 1 a year usually.





The sun finally popped through and I started to get swarmed on... by lizards.

For the life of me, I don't know how they get managed to get hooked.



Well, that was it.  Fought the summertime bay crowd to the ramp and had to look for openings from all the OTL RV's blocking the ramp all trying to get to the dump station.

Got home and didn't keep a single fish due to my freezers still overflowing with Channel Islands catches.

Until next tide!

[Pinoyfisher]

I've seen some boats making squid off of TP and SK.

[jrodda]

Nice day! Slamming critters for a couple hours is always a good time.

[Tim524]

Fun Bass and bottom feeder session

Boat Ramp chaos sucks out loud