Just got back from vacation in Avalon for a week with swimbait, mrs. swimbait, and an assortment of other people and families. Didn't get a whole lot of fishing in, but we did manage to get out a couple times. First expedition was to the pier where we made short work of about a zillion little calicos on squid strips in an hour or so.

We rented kayaks one day and rob packed his fishing rod along. I got out there a little later than rob and summer and managed to catch up with them, despite their attempt to ditch me by paddling as far away as humanly possible ;) j/k Rob had scored a couple calicos by the time I got there and I borrowed the rod for a few minutes and scratched up one barely legal size calico on the troll. We paddled on back toward the beach and I had to bail, having only a 2 hour rental. Rob picked up a few more calicos after I left.

Sometime around Wednesday or Thursday, Rob, Summer, myself and Mike (who had his family over there with us) all rented a boat. We started out trolling swimbaits along the kelp line, but that only produced a couple missed bites. Eventually we got down to just short of the seal rocks area and started hucking and winding like normal. We got on a pretty good school of calicos out in open water and it went pretty wide for about the forty five minutes we had left to fish. We all caught a couple, I think rob had scoreboard with about 4 or 5 or so. Everybody missed fish constantly, just about every cast. Seemed like they were just racing eachother to the bait and bouncing off of it or something. We were forced to fire up the motor and head back in before the rental place closed and had to leave em biting.

Mike twisted our arms and made us go back out the next afternoon, minus summer who opted for beach going. We went directly to the same spot, now dubbed "Capt. Bobo's Rock" (don't ask). We couldn't really get back on em like before, but scratched a couple and Mike landed a good sized cuda. I decided to take us to my back-up spot (riiiiight) and setup another drift closer to the rocks and we nailed a few more. After that we got on em pretty good. Seemed the fish moved up shallower into the rocks and kelp, but once we found em it was pretty steady fishing. It was a bite or two (or three or four) every cast or every other cast for quite awhile until we'd drift out of the zone, and then it was more of the same once back in position. Most of the calicos were solid fish, averaging 2lbs, up to the biggest which was about 3.5lbs. Once we beat up that stretch pretty thoroughly we ran up to the quarry and knocked a few more, but they were smaller fish. All said and done we had about 30 legals between the 3 of us in 4 hours, all caught on big hammer swimbaits. Color didn't matter much at all. We just about cleaned out my box of big hammers we went through so many, it was good times. We threw a few in the bucket livewell since we forgot a camera and took some pictures at the dock before tossing em back, much to the dismay of the dock workers. Rob will come through with those as soon as he's out of his coma from driving so much.

That was pretty much the end of our fishing time, but it was pretty darn good fishing, we all had a blast. It was cool to see Mike, who's normally a surf fisherman, get addicted to calico fishing :) He picked it up quick and was sticking em quite consistently on the swimbaits. Could've used a seabass or two to fill out the perfect day, but I guess wide open calico fishing on plastic is good enough... hehe :7
-Brian

Here's a pic of some of the better bass that we plucked off on the Hammer's. Thanks to Mike for the boat rental hookup and Captain BoBo for finding the fish and letting us chew up your entire box of baits :D I had a dang good time.

http://www.calfishing.com/images/daily_reports/8_1_03_catalina_calicos.jpg