Great weather and light winds made for some good surf fishing this week

Clear water, light winds and small surf helped to make this week productive up and down the coast. We had some good reports from Santa Barbara and Malibu this week of more halibut being caught on lures and flys just after the grunion run. You rarely hear of halibut and surf fish being caught on the fly--but the secrets out!!--I'm not the only one who has written about and used the Clouser Minnow on the Carolina Rig--Team 57's WingNut hooked and landed a 28"+ flattie on the fly and showed us again how productive these saltwater flys can be!

Another great bait for Halibut is the fresh dead grunion. I collect these by hand and fish them the next morning or freeze them for use at a later day. Fished on the Carolina Rig these are deadly for both halibut and calico bass.

In Ventura we had a nice report from John that although corbina fishing has been slow the bite on perch has been very good with most fish caught on the Carolina Rig using sand crabs.

Down in Orange County the surf fishing remained good with quite a few yellowfin Croaker caught this week along with a few corbina, perch, spotfin croaker and your usual cornucopia of sharks.

Phil let us know that early this week surf fishing in North San Diego was great with a nice catch of perch, corbina and a couple spotfin croaker up to 26". He fished a bit heavier gear and rigged several sand crabs (4 or 5 dime sized crabs) on a bait holder hook. The biggest spotfin was taken on this rig.

Sand crab collecting has been great this with crabs almost everywhere at the beach. The crabs have also been in almost every size with some great dime size crabs and some monster softies too.

One challenge this week was caused by the small surf. Corbina have been feeding in very close and the small surf in combination with clear water has made the fish very weary and harder to bait and hook. Small surf means less bubbles and less churning of the sand and bait from the bottom. In conditions like this, when I'm targeting corbina, I like to downsize to 4lb fluorocarbon leader and a size 6 split shot wire hook. I bury the hook in my bait and fish with one or two crabs (hooked back to front). Moving stealthily along the beach and fishing before sunrise and at sunset will help my chances not to spook the fish and get more corbina bites.

This upcoming week has some good tides and light winds. It looks like we will have a modest swell both from the West and Southwest building though the week peaking over next weekend. Tides look best in the late afternoon and evening--but we all know the right time to go fishing is whenever we can! As the swell fills in look for some great corbina fishing on the upcoming tides that should yield some of the best catches of the year...

Don't forget to send us your reports. We'll see you down there....

www.fishthesurf.com

Where you can check out our new Surf Tackle Pack