There's a salmon season this year! Not the one you want, but hopefully the one you need. What does that mean here? Well, not much or a lot, depending on a lot of variables. The San Francisco season, which includes Bodega and Tomales Bays, will be from June 27 to July 22, and August 1 to August 31, depending on the outcome of the 34,900 fish limit for the area. Early limits equals early closure, so be careful what you wish for. I always want to do better than the boats around me, but this year the competition is on for real. Cool. That seems like a big number but when you see how many fish were caught in a few days last year the number gets smaller. Maybe more days equals less effort? Pro. bably not  after three years of pretty much no season at all. There's a separate season in September but i fear that this year's prediction for a super-El Nino may screw up a September and October salmon season. For catching salmon, at least. Smart people are calling for a repeat of 2015. San Diego sportboats are just now catching August fish in April, namely yellowfin tuna and dorado,. Seems like the guys that are paying attention might be right. White seabass! Bluefin! Even a few very scattered yellowtail! What a year! I've never learned as much about fishing as I did in 2015, and I learned not nearly enough. I didn't know what I was seeing most of the time. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Read SoCal fishing discussion boards. We will be SoCal. Learn it. I'll give tips but I ain't gonna give up everything I learn. Why should I steal your joy from learning the same things? This year is a big opportunity. Treat it as such. 

   This poor little feller washed up on Dillon Beach today. This young California sea lion died of something probably besides a shark, but was nibbled on nonetheless. How do you know you don't like it until you've tasted it? Well, now we know. If it ain't wiggling it ain't as yummy. Or so it would seem. But those are teeth marks. So surfers, beware. We all know that Uncle Bigbite is out there, and he's been noshy lately, but this year he's been really hungry. Please don't be that guy. Or this guy in the picture. 

     There was another striper caught off of the Sand Point yesterday, by a fly fisherman if I heard correctly. Gage tried yesterday evening and caught nothing. It is fishing, and surf fishing at that. Not much else going on here but the rain this weekend.  But elsewhere...

    So, rumors of a "super El Niño" this year are growing, although an actual ENSO positive situation remains to be seen. It is forecast but has yet to resolve. The Blob is here and is warming waters, mostly by preventing most of the onshore winds of spring. There's been some windy days this year but not nearly as many as normal. It's kinda cool. SoCal water gurus are calling for a repeat of 2015. If you are unfamiliar with the importance of this, read this report from 2015 from July through October. Lots of white seabass. And similar things are happening this year. Yesterday the Shogun long range boat out of San Diego caught yellowfin on day one of a three day trip. Today they caught a dorado. These are August fish, if you're lucky. April seems awful early for August fish. Maybe this is 2015 redux. Salmon sucked in 2015. We needed this last year. Well, like someone once said, you can't always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.

 

Gage and I tried for halibut yesterday, trolling 40 to 60 feet of water on McClure's and the Keyholes for four hours for no bites. We left and went rockfishing off of Ten Mile. First stop we found schooling fish and limited on nice canaries within five minutes. Vermilion limits took another ten minutes. Then we moved around a bunch looking for schoolies as we are picky and school fish clean easier than the spiky devils. Another hour and we quit with seven black rockfish and three lingcod to join the orange fish and returned more than we kept, mostly browns, coppers, canaries and vermilion. We stopped by the sand point (what's left of it) and tried for stripers for no bites but heard later that one was caught from shore there just before we arrived.  

 

I didn't check my email before I posted last night and missed this report from Danielle Magenheimer: "21 inch Striper caught by swim bait over the weekend ".  Finally a surf striper. That's two fish pictures in two weeks. It's busting wide open! Or something.  Good work on the fish. There aren't many of them, yet.

   So there were some more halibut caught in the bay this weekend. I've learned a bit, and it turns out, whatever I say is probably crap, as it seems my prediction model has failed this year, but failed in the way you want it to fail, as in it under-predicts. There are halibut being caught now in Tomales Bay, not many, and not good, but fish, and some of them legal. So it's not that there's no fish, it's just mostly bad. Longer days will will bring better odds and success. Ocean rockfish is open and they're biting, deep and shallow. Shallow are fun, and deep are more numerous and more expensive to get to (gas prices) so good for them. 

   In the halibut realm, I heard of a keeper by Inverness and a witnessed lost jumbo by a kayaker at Hog in the last few days. I don't think that, makes halibut "Game on!" in Tomales but it bodes well. The good times are coming, although I don't think that three years of no salmon and all halibut bode well for an awesome halibut year. All halibut and no salmon make Jack a dull boy, and makes a fish that reproduces and grows very slowly a punching bag for sport fishermen eager to catch something. I'm totally guilty of that, and three years of laser focus on halibut have made us pretty good halibut fishermen, way better than before when we had other distractions. We still caught pretty regular last year, but that's because we fished for halibut. Every. Day. Or pretty much that much. And at a certain point, we left the bay as the easy water had been played out. It will be worse this year, probably. Or not, it's fishing, but it seems to me that too much pressure on one fish leads to, well, less fish. That sucks for all of us. I hope that we get a relatively decent salmon season, both for my sake and for the poor halibut. Because I learned some things last year, and I can't share them, nor should I, as if they're good for me they'd be bad for halibut in general if the word got out. Okay, here's the biggest thing I learned last year: If you've ever seen rockcod suspended over a rock in shallow water, you can use the same knowledge to see suspended halibut feeding actively over a sand bottom. Who knew that dropping in an actively feeding, out of the sand halibut would result in multiple hookups? I've only seen it a few times. but holy crap, they bite. Don't tell Gage I said this.