#7 Persistence
Saturday 4/4/26
We left Mission Bay Jetty around 7:30 am in the morning and pointed the boat south towards the Old Point Loma Lighthouse. We figured we would try to fish off of Point Loma since we saw great signs there the other day. The weather was beautiful. Calm seas, very little wind, and the water temperature was around 64.5 degrees. We kicked the trollers out once we started to see bait and birds and we caught a chunky calico bass pretty quick. We released it and kept looking for yellowtail. We worked off Point Loma for a bit, but it was hard to keep the trollers clear of eelgrass and kelp. We stopped to fish the Yoyo iron on a few marks we saw on on the sonar but no luck. We made a handful of bait with the sabiki and decided we better go check La Jolla to see what it was like in the afternoon.
When we got to La Jolla there were the typical pack of boats. We decided to keep our distance and look around. It was a slow day of fishing until around 2:30 pm. Water temperature hit just over 67 degrees and fish started to bite on the troll. We caught and released 1 calico bass and 2 barracuda all within 30-45 minutes. Birds started to work and we saw a small spot of yellowtail on the surface. We casted at it and it sank out before we could get a bite. We were hopeful they would show again so we stuck it out. Sure enough, being persistent paid off and we found ourselves in the perfect place when the spot of yellowtail came back to the surface. One cast and we were on. It felt really nice to land that fish, as we had seen great marks on the finder all day long. The radio was quiet and it seemed like the fish were down in the water column for most of the day. In the afternoon we caught all the fish within about an hour, and after that we didn’t see birds or any more activity on the surface. We called it a day around 4 pm and headed back in. Our fish weighed in at 30 lbs on the scale at home.
