Salmon & Sanddab mooching at Monterey, 4-1(Sat)

It was a sunny, calm and clear day - A great day of being out on the water. See pictures below.

Alex, Allen and I lauched our yaks at MBK around 6:30AM. We paddled out the area at ~170ft depth. We started sanddabbing first. It was pretty productive from the beginning. We pulled in dabs every drop. Sometimes, I had 3-4 dabs hooked together (see pictures below). Reeling them up from 170ft water was not an easy task. Arms got tired after 10 times.  We were "mooching" dabs for a couple of hours. Thank Alex for showing us how and he is our coach and expert.

Both my fishing finder and Alex's newly bought FF stoped working this morning. It is Piranha Max 10. This model is not recommended if you are looking for FF.  Later when we met Joel, he had bad experience with this model too in the past. We relied on Allen's unit. He informed us of the depth from time to time.

After slack tide, we switched our gear to salmon mooching. We were basically blind. W/o FF, we could not see bait balls, depth and contours. We were mooching with faith.  After more than 1 hour of mooching, my bait were stolen two times - no obvious baits. We started heading in around 1PM.

We had great day out on the water and had paddled ~8 miles. Sanddabing was productive, but salmon fishing was not.

A great morning view of sky

Get ready to launch

a string of sanddabs at one pull:

A picture of monterey shoreline was taken from calm water (1+ mile away).

Seals barking on Red Buoy

Yup it was a fun day (minus my spill in the surf on the way back where I lost my knife and tackle box) but I only marked bait on the fishfinder in midwater once and marked some schools of bottomfish, probably blues. I don't know where they were but they weren't around us yesterday.

Nice of meeting you, Aaron. Here is fishing & camping trip, if you are interested in joining.
http://www.norcalkayakanglers.com/bb/index.php?topic=3178.0

Great pics, thanks for the report. I can hardly wait for the trip in may..

Craigh

Nice dabs, guys!

Wholly smokes... Where was that picture taken... I didn't see the ocean that flat all day long. I would have killed for conditions like that today.

Freddie

Freddie - Pictures were taken from around RED buoy area at 170ft depth. Ocean was as calm as we can get.

Yes it was a beautiful day indeed!  With good company and great fishing it made it even better. Thanks Aaren and Eric for coming out... Eric, Your a natural born dabber. It was very nice to have met you in person. We have to do it again soon.

Eric, I took my FF (Parana 10) back to Mel Cotton's. They hooked it up to there power and it worked. with the same batteries we put them in another Parana 10  unit and it worked. it turned out that the battery pack was defective on the first unit. So you should check out your ff for any short coming from the battery compartment. All the batteries we had thought were bad was actually good. I checked them out on a meeter.

again thanks for coming down to fish.

Alex 

Heya,
Got some pics of the dabbies I took home. Turned out to be 19 instead of the 10 or so I thought I had caught. Maybe some swam into my bag when I flipped it in the surf coming in

Here's the biggest guy at around 10"



And the whole gang

Hey,

Aaron - are you sun-drying dabs?  . I got more than 50 (too many to count). It was fun.
Alex - My FF works now at home. Let us go out again soon. This time we may want to get salmons or halibuts, given that both our FF are working now. Our odds of catching them gets much better.

Good company indeed.