There's no excuse to not go fishing on Monterey Bay right now. If you ever felt the yen, or think you may be too busy with chores and gardening projects, our best advice is to drop everything else and jump on a boat. Literally everything is here and active, starting with tons of bait in the Bay. Commercial squid boats are finding pockets of market squid fairly shallow in locations from Monterey to Capitola. Everything in the ocean eats squid. Sardines made a good appearance at the start of our fishing season, while bait-sized anchovies are starting to flood in now. One private boater reported,"anchovies and mackerel are everywhere in 30-50 feet of water." Any of these small finfish make excellent live bait to be used for rockfish, lingcod, halibut, white sea bass or bonito. The Pacific Mackerel is a preferred bait in Northern California for the giant bluefin tuna that continue to lurk off our coast.

Santa Cruz Coastal Charters worked the inside reefs on Wednesday catching a nice variety of rockfish including browns, blues, blacks and gophers. Skipper Rodney Armstrong reported on Tuesday's trip, saying "We got to go fish the deep water today. First spot we had to leave because we had all the vermilion and canary’s we could keep. Then we moved out deeper and found a bunch of chili peppers and large brown widows. Also two bonus keeper lingcod and one short one."

Meanwhile on Stagnaro's Sportfishing big boat The Velocity the weekend report indicated limits on their five-hour deep sea cod trips both Saturday and Sunday, mostly nice reds and widow Cod. Stagnaro's also reported "Nearshore/shallow water cod trips are getting about 3/4 limits."

J&M Sportfishing had a good day Saturday on the New Horizon. Twenty anglers had a blast catching full limits of 200 rockfish along with a bonus of 13 lingcod. J&M runs three big boats out of Monterey Harbor, the New Horizon, Kahuna and the Chubasco. Look at their fish counts and you will see that this time of year they report nothing but limits of fish for each of the trips. The boats are big enough to ride comfortably and they often make the effort to travel towards Big Sur, where the fishing is fast and furious, and the fish are bigger because there is less pressure in the area from other anglers.

Todd Fraser from Bayside Marine in Santa Cruz noted some exceptional fishing near Santa Cruz on Saturday. A variety of species were reported, all from the inshore area. Fraser says salmon fishing has slowed somewhat. Salmon season is certainly not over by any means, but last week was slow. Meanwhile when the chinook don't bite, there are plenty of other species to chase. Fraser's Saturday report noted, "Today was a great day for near shore fishing. The anglers caught a mix of salmon, sea bass, rock fish, lingcod, and halibut all inside of 150 feet of water. There were some limits of salmon trolling near Three Trees in 150 feet of water. There was a solo limit of salmon caught near Capitola in 40 feet of water. The halibut and sea bass were caught from Capitola to Pajaro. The sea bass and halibut were caught on Big Hammers, Purple Haze Hoochies, squid, and mackerel."