The prediction of an early winter-type storm for Monday and Tuesday was concerning for many Monterey Bay anglers. It’s early in the season for “The Rains” to start, and powerful winter storms often have the effect of shutting down the good fishing of fall. Turns out everything went almost perfectly. The storm was somewhat condensed time-wise and did not include huge swells. We received a decent amount of rainfall, which is always appreciated, and fishing remained consistent both before and after the storm blew through. It is not wintertime yet.

In fact, fishing is remarkably good these days for anglers around the bay. The top echelon desirable fish, only sometimes available from our home waters, has to be bluefin tuna. While not crazy good, fishing for bluefin has been steady for quite a while now. When boats have nice enough conditions, they are finding and catching the big tuna at a fairly steady rate. Todd Fraser at Bayside Marine tracks the local bluefin catches closely. Fraser is a bit of a tuna nut himself. He reported a few fish caught last week, and weighed in an 87-pound fish over the weekend, caught on a Mad Mack somewhere “in the middle of the bay,” according to Fraser. Mid-week reports indicated good conditions for tuna in the Fingers area about 15 miles offshore from Davenport, a location that has produced a number of tuna catches so far this year.

Closer to shore, rockfish and lingcod catches remain prolific. Thankfully, we are allowed to fish all depths for RCG Complex fish until the end of December (Rockfish, cabezon and greenlings). Bigger fish and quicker limits are awarded to the anglers who choose to go deep, fishing 250-350 feet of water for chilipeppers, vermilion and canary rockfish. A few lings are hanging out in the deep still, but their yearly migration toward shore for spawning is in process. The charter boats have reported nothing but limits of rockfish for their clients for the past few weeks. Inshore fishing can produce plenty of bites, but many of the rockfish caught this time of year in 30 to 60 feet of water are small juveniles. These little guys should be handled with care and properly released for the future. Remarkably, there are quite a few halibut still feeding from the inshore waters. The California halibut migrate towards deep water for the winter. This year we are seeing an unexpected number of flatties caught in the 40-60 foot depths, including a few slabs in the 25 to 30-pound range. It’s unusual, but we have even fielded reports of (undersized) halibut caught by surfcasters from one of the Santa Cruz city beaches this week.

Surfcasting is a great proposition at this time. Perch are getting longer and fatter as they gorge on the teeming sandcrab population on beaches around the bay. Nearshore baitfish are still feeding birds, seals and whales close by the beach. The abundance of bait has attracted a good number of striped bass to the shallows, and the catch rate for bass is rising, both within the bay and from the wild north coast beaches as well.