Fort Ross 8/6

Met up with Skyboy Joe at Fort Ross at about 6:00 AM to calm seas and fog.  We took our time launching... were in the water by 7:00.  No bird action or bait being marked, so I didn't worry about looking for salmon and went right for the rockfishing.

Relatively slow day of fishing for Fort Ross, each of us landed I suppose around 15 misc rockfish plus those that we kept.  I released two legal lings (~26")... kept one that was ~28" and kept an 18" cabazone.  Joe also kept a legal ling and a nice cabby plus a greenling and a couple other assorted rockfish.  He had already kept a cabby and later caught another one that was quite a bit larger... maybe 20" or so... had to let it go... broke his heart.

Most of my fish came on a sardine colored swimbait tipped with baby octopus... Joe mostly fished with irons.

About noon or so, Joe and I geared up to dive for some abs... I picked an easy quick limit... nothing huge... one about 8 1/2".  Joe picked two... he didn't bring his weighbelt down from the car with him so he was a little on the buoyant side... had to pull himself down the kelp to get to the bottom.  That's doing it the hard way... but abs were plentiful to say the least.  About 6' of visibility.

All in all a nice day... perfect weather... wind never did come up on Lake Pacific and overcast skys kept it cool.  Wish I could have stayed all day.

Erik out...

Erik, great report, but good thing we didn't stay all day, getting up at 1:30am to get up there took its toll on the trip home, I was exausted. Gotta get that new digital, we got no pics. The ocean giveth and the ocean taketh away......

Thanks for the report, fellas.

I've noticed the catch per unit effort at fort ross has dropped to 1/2 to 1/3 of what it was when I first fished there 3 years ago.  I'm not sure why that is, could be power/partyboaters have read our reports and been heading up there (I doubt kayakers could make a big dent) or maybe the nearshore stocks in general are collapsing since it seems to be degrading in other areas I fish too.  

I'm thinking we should maybe start under-reporting our catches from the more out of the way honey holes so we don't inspire powerboats, and especially partyboats/commercials to make the trip in the hopes of better catches.  

Anyway, weather permitting I'll be doing a fort ross run myself a week from sunday.

Hey Josh... I don't really know if there is any real indication of overfishing.  I've seen party boats fishing that area for the past 5 or 6 years with about the same regularity.  Fort Ross is no secret.

I think that there are a lot of variables that can affect the fishing up there... water temps, clarity, abundance of baitfish, current, tides, cloudy or sunny conditions, barometric pressure... and right now, the kelp is extremely thin for this time of year, like it's all been blown out of there in the area to the south of the cove toward the reef.  We had a hard time finding an attached stalk of kelp to tie off our kayaks in the place where we dove, where ordinarily it's a thick kelp forest.  That's gotta have an effect on the abundance of smaller schooling rockfish that the larger lings feast on.

In the past, I've had days where fishing was HOT, only to turn off suddenly.  I've also had plenty of hot fishing days where the next weekend it shut off for no apparent reason.  

I also noticed that most of the other reports I saw this weekend where people were fishing for rockfish were not all that stellar.  Might just be the weather pattern we're in.

That's what I think anyway.  I think it's all a matter of hitting it right.  No matter what... when you run into a suicidal ling bite at Fort Ross, it's an awesome day on the water.

Erik