LAST EDITED ON Sep-01-01 AT 08:36 PM (PST)

Today Brian and I had a chance to fish with Larry Heron on the Calico Hunter II. We launched from Channel Islands Harbor at 5:00am and ran south to the deep hole area. The weather was great and we ran 35 to 40mph on the way down. We spent all morning in the deep hole area drifting and cruising the kelp with the trolling motor. By 11:30 we had caught and released 19 legal calicos along with a decent number of shorts and small sandies. Most fish came on 5" big hammers in browns and greens. Brian got most of his fish on the Calico Hunter color, Larry caught his on all sorts of stuff, and I caught almost all of mine on one of the new colors Larry came up with called silver sardine. Silver sardine is sweet! I caught one fish on a 6" hammer and it was our best calico around 3 and a quarter or so. Brian got one on the fastrac and I also got one on the iron. But by in large it was a plastics bite. Larry had a bigger fish going on 12lb that looked over 5 pounds but it broke off close to the boat. At 11:30 we moved up the line hitting various areas and wound up on the Ventura flats where we picked up 8 pretty decent sand bass on plastic in 80 to 90 feet. No real grumpy sand buggers, they were mostly 2 to 3 pounders. All bass were released.
Exotics of the day included a martian (aka kelp fish) for Larry on the plastic, a school of johnny bass that were attaching Brians swimbait on the surface, one sculpin, and one sand dab which wound up deposited on my jacket after a sandbass barfed it up on me(not cool)! All in all a fun trip and a pretty decent bite. The camera was acting wierd but here's one pic I did get of Larry with a nice bass. Water temps were 66 to 67 degrees, not much current, a light breeze in the afternoon, and mostly blue clear water.


http://www.calfishing.com/dcforum/User_files/3b91a7c52db5180c.jpg