Slow to decent rockfishing this week with numbers ranging from a few to limits of rockfish and half limits of lings. The better bite has been deeper and further from port, primarily 100+ feet of water from Elephant to Point Reyes. There was a halibut taken and another lost from the northern edge of Dillon Beach. The Dungeness are still showing up in decent numbers in the nets on the pier but the forecast is for the numbers to not hold up. The first few weeks will be the best, probably.

Rockfish action has been pretty good, mostly at Points Reyes and Tomales, but not too many other critters showing up in the fish boxes. There was a 12# halibut caught by a kayaker on a jig last week, right across the bay from the boathouse at the bottom of the tide. Lots of Dungeness in the crab nets tempting people. Hopefully it's not the same 12 crabs getting tossed back in over and over. Less than two weeks until we find out.

This is Alec Bennett on the Shrimp Boat last Sunday. This is his first albacore. Alec now knows how to troll for tuna while napping on an ice chest. It's an important skill, at least the way I fish it is. Luckily for Alec, he didn't get into a wide open tuna bite on his first trip, because that can ruin a man and give him false impressions about tuna fishing. Nice work, Alec, and may your next trip skew your impression of tuna fishing toward the improbably good. 

    The weather forecast has turned and is not now supposed to be very good tomorrow, but the nearshore rockfishing should still be pretty good. It's about an 80 mile run to tuna water, so rockfish is probably your best bet.

Looks like good weather for the weekend. A tuna run appears to be out of the question, though, unless the warm water is hiding under all that ice water the wind pushed up. The rockfish are still biting, at least. We put three limits of mostly blacks in the boat in less than an hour in 100 feet of water at Elephant Rock reef this morning and another boat got their limits there as well. The lings bit somewhat slower. The water temperature was 51 degrees so we passed on trolling the beach for halibut.

On Sunday, Travis Barton caught this albacore at 38° 14' by 123° 57' while many other people went fishless.

Local legend Gerard Fitzgerald and crew A.J. Masters and Fugi caught these three albacore, adding to his legend but not his modesty.

This would be the high point of my tuna fishing trip on Sunday, watching the sun rise over the coast. From here it pretty much tapered off to burning fuel and napping intermittently. Saturday was apparently the day for tuna fishing with quite a few albacore and even a few exotics (dorado, opah) in the mix for the guys that didn't wait for the better weather forecast. Other than that there's been some rockfish caught off of Tomales Point and at Point Reyes.

It looks like Saturday is the window to get out to the tuna. The New Sea Angler picked up 50 albacore 41 miles west of Bodega yesterday. The satellite picture shows warm water at about 38° 20' by 123° 52'. The weather forecast is bad until Saturday so hopefully the water will wait for us.