The endless wind has ended, the weather has been flat calm, lingcod bite has been the best I’ve ever seen in my life, and the albacore are back in town for the first time in a decade. Fishing season is back in full swing. Air temps have a balmy 60 to 70 degrees on the water, and water surface temps are in the low 60s, it finally feels like summer has finally arrived and It couldn’t be better.

Wide open Lingcod Action.

8-09-23

We decided to do a bluefin scout trip. We trolled all the way to the half moon bay boey for not a bite, but there were a few boats around us picking up albacore for the first time in over 10 years. Unfortanlty we were unable to get them to bite for us, since we didn’t pack much in terms of albacore gear, but we stopped on the way home and found out the lingcod bite was wide open and grabbed a few lings including this monster 30+lb ling.

8-11-23

Our 6 clients dealt with some wind chop for the ride out to the banks but It payed off. It took nearly 2 hours to get out there but once we did it only took an hour to pull up 14 lings from 12 lbs to 27 lbs with 4 lings over 20lbs and many in the high teens. We also got a few very good quality reds and canary up to 8lbs in the mix as well with a monsterous 12lb red, which was nearly 34 inches. After getting some crew lings we switched over to rockfish and found a solid bite on jumbo 4 to 6lb pound widows and yellows. After a smooth ride in clients had several bags of fillets to go home with each. Overall epic day and it dosnt get much better than this.

8-13-23

The albacore have officially arrived in Bodega Bay and I was pretty happy to there to pull the first few into the harbor for 2023. Today I jumped on with some buddies to go explore for albacore, and we found some biters and a whole lot more that didn’t want to eat. We hit a single pretty quick in the morning, took a few more hours for us to get relocated on some biters again but we ended up with 6 for the day a slow pick in the afternoon. Quality was about 10 lbs, but I expect that to improve quickly, as it typically gets better as the season progresses. It’s been a decade since albacore showed in this water, so this is a great sign of what’s to come. There were a few short strikes, lots of jumpers, and a whole lot of fish in the area that didn’t want to play that much. The water is moving in quickly and we have good weather all week to get them really dialed in.

8-14-23

Another day with limits of quality lings. Flat calm ocean and great weather allowed us to smoothly run offshore and we didn’t have a touch of wind all day. Lings bit slower today compared to the other day but we had multiple instances were every rod in the water was hooked up on a big Ling. It was a bit hit or miss on them, you either had all rods hooked up or once, or none. We lost many more than we landed so there was defiantly a few willing to eat once we found some hot spots. Overall a great day and some of the best bottom fishing we’ve had in decades out of Bodega Bay.

8-16-23

Spent all day on a crew trip searching for albacore, the water did move very close to us, basically on top of Cordell only 30 miles from the dock, but the albacore are a bit spread out and most boats had 3 fish or less, us included with 3 not so picture worthy longfins. Its early in the season and we are hoping the albacore bite improves, and the good news is that the bluefin seem to be charging north a steady clip past Monterey, so we may have them pretty soon. Unfortanlty we had some engine problems on the sorta salty, after a few late nights I found the problem to be a simple fix, an easy timing gear that was going out. But we will be back at chasing tuna for the weekend, and possibly towing up to Fort Bragg next week for the epic albacore bite going on up there.