Bluefin Bite Still Wide Open

10-21-23

Capt Josh ran the Sorta Salty Today. He had an open charter interested in rock cod so he ran to the shallow grounds and pulled limits of nice quality rockfish and a few lingcod. The rock cod bite has started to slow down in the deeper water and has tapered off from where it was a few months ago, typically we are shifting to shallow water but DFG has not allowed us to do so for this year, on the bright side we will likely be getting a good chunk of Cordell Banks to fish next year which will have some really good fishing. And on the even brighter side the bluefin bite has been insane from Monterey to Fort Bragg.

While capt Josh ran the Sorta Salty I jumped on my dads boat for a well needed recreational day fishing. All three of us on the boat have all got several bigeye and blues already this year and we were looking for something better excitement wise than some madmac fish. We didn’t care about getting a bunch of fish, as none of us have any freezer room but I wanted a fish on speargun and one on the spinning rod. Started trolling and it took about 15 minutes to find foamers, Birds didn’t seem right and fish weren’t smacking the way I like , so we pointed west and found a massive stretch of foamers and hooked up on a 120lber right away, Got it to the boat in 10 or 15 minutes. My dad tosses a colt sniper into a ball of foamers right as the bait was flying out of the water and it gets smacked before he shut the bail. Fought it for a while and it must have swallowed the jig and the teeth cut the 80lb mono leader so we switched to 150 flouro. Got lines back in and trolled and hooked up another fish right away, had techincal issues on that one (someone forgot to turn the clicker on and we didn’t see it until too late..). Had 5 boats I didnt know within bare eyesight which is more crowded than I like to fish so we moved 5 miles away to find some new fish. Got the speargun ready and made a few drops on foamers but fish wouldnt come under the boat. Threw the hot pink mac out while I was sitting on the transom with gun in hand rolling up on foamers and hooked up right away and got it to the boat in about 10 minutes, about a 160lb fish. Got collected and lined up on some foamers with gun in hand. My dad yells fish at 50 so I bail and take a good breath then drop. See scattered fish at about 30 feet and then hit the thermocline at 45 feet or so, and fish surround me at all angles and I start lining up a shot and waiting for a fish to come into range, I see a few massive fish in the distance but one little guy breaks away and swim up about 15 feet from me so I let it fly and instantly see the shaft skewer it. Get back up to a tomb stoned ( vertical bobbing because the fish is pulling it) float and grab a breath and I see the fish charging the boat at full speed then a circle back toward me, It was a good shot and landed on his spine so it couldn’t control its direction and I grabbed the fish quick and flipped it upside down to subdue before knifing it . Here’s a video I made. Quality at depth wasn’t great but I was completely surrounded by fish, it was just to dark to see them on camera. Make sure to clear the gear button on the lower right corner of the video and adjust quality to 1080 if you want to see anything, as YouTube tends to turn the quality down if your internet connection isn’t lightening fast.

Wasn’t near my biggest on spear and only checked in at 140lbs or so but still one of the most exciting fish I’ve gotten on spear since it was Norcal and I didn’t expect to actually get one on the first time trying. I was pretty stoked to be the first and have hopefully started wave of NorCal bluewater divers. After we got collected on the boat we spent another 20 minutes throwing colt snipers into foamers for no bites before heading home at noon ish. Epic personal day off and could have sank the boat with fish but we decided to have some fun with it. We have some good weather approaching and will likely be running a lot of trips next week chasing big blues.