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My wife said she wanted to have rockfish again for dinner (and we had out of town guests coming for dinner) Uh oh...pressure was on, so I decided to give the upper flats a look. It's pretty close and I figured if the morning bite didn't pan out, I could still hit up another location in the afternoon. I launched out of Millard Tydings marina around 5:30 trolling my usual search lures, one paddle tail, one yozuri minnow. Caught my first schoolie up near the yellow buoy...
kept searching some of the upper ditches. Much of this area has become pretty weed choked making trolling pretty difficult. There must have been a bass tournament that day as well as there were like 40 bass boats out there fishing the flats pretty hard. I ended up marking better numbers of fish in the upper reaches in 14-20 fow. Kept seeing marks but no takers.
Decided to switch up to a deeper diving plug. First pass, bam! A nice 22 inch fish.
A couple of smaller schoolies followed
but none over 17. One more pass through a deeper section and a nice and much fatter 23 for the table...
fortunately the 22 was still doing well enough to cull for the bigger fish. It started to get a bit choppy around noon so I loaded up and gave a look around up by Lapidum. Caught a smallmouth, missed a few other fish which I assumed were smaller fish and boated one 19.
All in all not a bad day....the weather was about as good as you could ask for.
Filets on the grill: I baste the filets with a mixture of 2 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice + salt and pepper. I use the foil to keep from sticking and it keeps the fish smell out of the kitchen.
kept searching some of the upper ditches. Much of this area has become pretty weed choked making trolling pretty difficult. There must have been a bass tournament that day as well as there were like 40 bass boats out there fishing the flats pretty hard. I ended up marking better numbers of fish in the upper reaches in 14-20 fow. Kept seeing marks but no takers.
Decided to switch up to a deeper diving plug. First pass, bam! A nice 22 inch fish.
A couple of smaller schoolies followed
but none over 17. One more pass through a deeper section and a nice and much fatter 23 for the table...
fortunately the 22 was still doing well enough to cull for the bigger fish. It started to get a bit choppy around noon so I loaded up and gave a look around up by Lapidum. Caught a smallmouth, missed a few other fish which I assumed were smaller fish and boated one 19.
All in all not a bad day....the weather was about as good as you could ask for.
Filets on the grill: I baste the filets with a mixture of 2 parts olive oil to 1 part lemon juice + salt and pepper. I use the foil to keep from sticking and it keeps the fish smell out of the kitchen.
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