#26 Send It Saturday

Saturday 7/25/26

Lately we have been holding off on looking offshore, plus the inshore game has been fun and great for the kids. With our local waters really heating up we decided today was the day to send it and take a look for ourselves. You can only wait so long to see it for yourself! We decided to launch the boat around 8 am and try to make bait as the bait barge has been out of it. Making bait did not go as well as we hoped. We tried the usual spots on the way to La Jolla, then looked all over LJ for bait. We scratched away at making mackerel, but it took a while. Once we had 14 pieces we figured we would give it a shot. Now it was about 1 pm. We ran out north west and found a nice patty. First we casted the irons and didn’t see much. On the second cast I had a fish splash about 20 ft behind my lure, and that was the sign we needed to get a live bait in the water. While I fished a live bait we decided to cast the toddler’s tiny hook up bait just for fun, because we hadn't had any bites yet. We thought maybe the fish were line shy… then the 12lb test started screaming off the reel. Hook up! Of course it was on the light line. This was quite the battle, as the fish swam right into the kelp. We got a few looks at it and it was a yellowtail. After about 5-10 mins fighting the fish unfortunately it broke off. While this was happening my live bait got picked up and for a quick few seconds I was fighting another fish. It jumped right at the patties edge and the fluorocarbon leader snapped off in the middle. It was very strange. We tried to get another bite for a few more minutes but the fish seemed spooked. With no more signs of fish and no bites we had to move on. About 20 minutes later we found another smaller patty and we set up on it. Second cast with the surface iron was a biter. It was a pretty quick fight, and we got a yellow on the boat. We could see there was one other yellowtail on the patty because it also was following the iron back to the boat but it wouldn’t bite. We moved on and found a few more patties with no one home, and we started to run out of daylight. Came home with one yellowtail, but overall had a nice day on the water. Weather was nice and calm, and with water temps in the 75-76 degree range we should have some fun offshore days ahead of us!

Surface Iron biter!