[Sea Hag]

Boats like the Phantom don’t run a whole lot of open party trips on the weekend, so when the opportunity to get on one presented itself for Sunday I jumped on it!

So, after watching the weather all week, I thought I might have hit it just about right. A warming trend for the week was to peek on Sunday, with calm seas and clear sunny skies. Water temps reported were slowly rising, so I felt pretty good about it when I headed for the landing Saturday night.

I arrived at the landing and received an enthusiastic greeting from Captain Tino. They had just gotten back in and were cleaning the boat, but he said I could bring my gear down and leave it on the dock to go park my car in the overflow lot (the close spots were all taken, with 5 or 6 cars of guys tailgating waiting for a spot to open…)

With the 8 anglers boarded, we were off to Catalina by 8:00. Tino suggested we each set up at least one outfit for the trip right away while we had light: 30-40#, ½ oz. slider, and a heavy 5/0 – 6/0 hook. He thinks flouro is unnecessary in the murky water, fresh dead squid is probably as effective or more so than live, and thread the squid onto the hook and up the shank as much as you can, or the perch with just steal it away from you.

I got up at 4:00 to find I had missed out on the hot morning bite… several bat rays and there was one calico bass in a sack, that was it.

He started the boat and moved it just as it was barely gray light, and anchored us in his favorite spot. We hadn’t even settled on the anchor when one of the guys hooked into something, and quickly landed it…. Our first seabass of the day, it measured less than an inch too short.

As the sun came up, you could see the water was a milky green against the beach, but where we were sitting it was crystal clear. Then within a half an hour or so, the direction of the swell shifted, and a similar milky cloud surrounded the Phantom in an odd half moon shape off the beach, and we were parked right in the center of it. And right about then, the fish started biting pretty good. I hooked into what I assumed would be a nice calico, but it turned out to be a good sized yellowfin croaker. Tino said they were good eating, so I kept it. (I ended up getting a limit of them for myself, and probably put another 8 or 10 in other people’s sacks… I had the hot stick for the day on the croakers, for sure!!)





We sat on that spot for several hours, and caught everything except seabass. One guy caught a really big barred surf perch. Various rays and sharks did great seabass imitations, and kept our blood moving and kept us on our toes. I caught a guitar fish that had Tino doing a great rock star act before he let it go. We caught a few sargo and several halibut (a couple legal). The current changed, and a bunch of kelp and grass drifted through, then changed again and the water went clear. And the bite shut off like someone flipped a switch.



We moved down the beach to another spot of milky water. After a few minutes, the nibblers started biting again. Tino went up to the wheel house and came back down and said he was metering a lot of fish right under the boat and they looked like the right kind. And right about then I hooked into something heavy, but after a few brief moments of intense excitement, we saw the distinctive spots of a leopard shark. Then another guy caught one, and then another. Tino decided that’s what we’d been metering. (I guess the spots don’t show on the meter marks!!) And again, with a change in the wind and the swell, the water went clear, and we moved again.

That was pretty much how it went all day. We didn’t sit in one spot long if the fish didn’t bite. Ten or 15 minutes, and we were on our way if nothing happened. It certainly wasn’t boring, we had a pretty steady bite on one spot or another all day. We did one unproductive drift for halibut (and picked up one octopus). We ended up with 5 or 6 legal halibut (one for the JP), released quite a few short ones along with quite a number of short seabass in the morning. 7 or 8 leopard sharks released, lots of calicos released with only a few that were sacked. All in all, it was a pretty fun trip, with a nice group of anglers.




Capt. Tino apologized profusely for not getting us on any seabass today, and told me he hoped they could get me out another time when the biscuits wanted to cooperate.

And how many times have we all been out and heard “you should have been here yesterday”? Well, for our little group, I guess it was “you should have been here tomorrow”. They cleaned up the boat and went back out Sunday night with 8 more anglers, and on Monday they picked up limits of seabass. Figures.