Happy 250th Birthday USA! Amidst the festivities of your holiday weekend, we’d recommend you carve out a little time for fishing in the Monterey bay area. Weather conditions are forecast to be very mild with comfortable seas and low wind for the next few days. Best of all, there are plenty of fish out there and they are on the bite.

Dedicated salmon anglers are still finding fish, even limits of beautiful King salmon along the canyon edges and north of Santa Cruz towards Pigeon Point. The salmon are still schooling deep, right on the bottom, in 180 to 280 feet of water.

Most numerous and easiest to catch are rockfish and lingcod. We’re at the height of rockfish season for the next few months. Local anglers are finding success while fishing for both nearshore and deep-water rockfish. Inshore fish are a little smaller, and more scattered at the moment, while the generally larger deep reef fish are congregating in big schools. Charter boats operating from Monterey and Santa Cruz consistently report full limits of rockfish for their clients since the season opened. In Monterey, J&M Sportfishing

tallied 200 rockfish and up to eight lingcod on various trips this week. Stagnaro’s Fishing Trips from Santa Cruz also reported limits of rockfish even on their shorter four-hour trips. The charter skippers have years of experience and local knowledge, plus bigger boats that can smooth out some of the rougher conditions we may run into. It’s a great alternative for those who don’t have access to private fishing boats, and a safe stable platform for bringing the kids.

Halibut fishing remains steady in the usual flat sandy areas from 40 to 80 feet of water. Live bait works best. Luckily, there’s tons of bait in the bay right now. shore, we’re seeing mostly Pacific mackerel in the six to nine-inch size. These are big baits, but even a small halibut will eat them if you stay patient and feed them line. Speaking of bait, big thanks go to Captain Rick Ryan, a Santa Cruz local and long-time commercial fisherman and boat-builder. Ryan has installed a new bait receiver at then of “S” Dock in the Santa Cruz Harbor. The receiver is ready to go, and Ryan is on the hunt on the “Gary Salt” for bait-sized anchovies and sardines in the local areas adjacent to Santa Cruz. We’ve been missing live bait at the Harbor since the retirement of legendary bait man Carl Acevedo better known as “Bocci- Boy.”

Despite the cool weather of the past week, ocean conditions are still in a state of general warming. “The Blob,” a huge balloon of warm water extending from Mexican waters up towards the Pacific Northwest is holding steady with surface water temps running about four degrees above normal, and certain inshore spikes measuring nearly eight degrees above normal.  To top it off, forecasters are holding to a projection of a “Super El-Nino” this year. The El Nino conditions usually mean additional distinct warm water intrusions coming from the south and running close to shore in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. It’s always interesting to see what exotic species wind up in Monterey Bay when we have this sort of warm water situations. So far this year, we’ve fielded reports of yellowtail caught in Monterey, a little bump in the number of white sea bass caught all around the bay feeding on squid and mackerel, Calico bass near the Monterey Bay aquarium and just this week a few separate reports of flying fish observed or caught in nearshore waters.