BDOutdoors' Memorial Day weekend SoCal Bight briefing opened with weather, but the news buried halfway through the video is the one that ought to interest the long-range fleet: bluefin tuna are back inside US waters off the back side of San Clemente Island, and the deep-water calico and sandbass game has now switched on from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border.
The weather window through the long weekend is the first item on the agenda. "It's been kind of a breezy week here for the most part," the presenter explains. "A lot of different wind directions on every day, but it's definitely been blowing." Mornings should be calm with the typical SoCal afternoon west winds returning. "We have calm weather in the mornings followed by just the afternoon west winds that are typical this time of year," he says, adding the warning for private skippers: "If you're going somewhere far and you have a center console, I'd recommend leaving before the wind starts blowing."
Offshore is where the picture gets interesting. Long-range fleets running out of San Diego are already on a solid grade of bluefin off the back side of Clemente, and BDOutdoors is flagging a likely expansion of the fleet from northern ports as soon as the weekend.
"The big news in offshore fishing is that the bluefin have moved into US waters," the presenter says. "There are a good grade of bluefin being caught off the backside west end of Clemente… all the pressure has been in one area, but the area that those fish are in is pretty similar to the area it's been in for last few years. Once boats start running out of Long Beach or San Pedro or Redondo or Marina Del Rey, they're going to be coming at different angles. And if it's day boats, I think they'll probably find fish closer than that."
Most of the bluefin are being landed at night, with the long-range and reverse day-and-a-half boats taking the lion's share. "I'm sure the boats will be out there this weekend flying kites and flying fish and catching all kinds of giants," he says. "It's good to see them up there already. And hopefully they stick around and bite."
Closer to the coast, the deep-structure calico and sandbass bite is the meat of the report. "Calicos and sandbass are biting on deep water structure spots," the presenter says. "And this is good now, continue to get better as we get into summer. You can fish big spots, you can fish small spots, whatever you want to do, but you're going to need your fish finder to find the structure, your chart to find the structure."
The technique varies by spot size. On small isolated pieces — a 10-foot rock, a wreck, a single reef — the game is positional: drop a swimbait on a heavy lead head over the structure and the bass come up to eat it. On big bottom features like Eve's Reef or the Santa Ana River pipe, the presenter argues for hunting bait, not bass marks.
"If I'm fishing a big piece of structure, be it a submerged pipe, a big reef like Eve's, a large area of hard bottom, I'm not necessarily looking for bass marks," he says. "I'm looking for bait balls because the bass, if they're feeding, are going to be wherever that bait is. So you drive around and you find bait on the meter and you drop your lure. And if you watch the fish finder a lot of that time, you can see your lure going down. And then right after you drop to that bait school, you'll see a bunch of bass come up off the bottom."
A windy local session out of Point Fermin around to Torrance also produced — seven-inch MC slug bodies on weedless and weighted keel hooks pulled fish off isolated kelp stringers outside the main beds, with the boat kept moving through the drift line.
The report's most pointed moment is not about fish. The presenter dedicates several minutes to lobbying viewers to back CCA's Sacramento advocacy fund, arguing that California fishing rights are 'truly in jeopardy' and that the work that matters happens in committee rooms and working groups long before any public meeting hits the news.
"Ninety percent of these fisheries decisions are made long before they have public meetings," he says. "CCA works behind the scenes — we're on working groups like the Barred Sand Bass working group collecting data for them, for the Fish and Game Commission, because they don't have the resources to collect their own data. And rather than take data paid for by the NRDC or these other organizations that don't want you to fish, we are advocating for angler-driven data and they are accepting it if we turn it in."
The CCA Star Tournament also kicks off Saturday and runs through Labor Day, with a 17-foot Mako boat and a $3,000 Shimano shopping spree on the prize table. Sign-up is $40 for CCA members, $80 for non-members. For SoCal anglers planning a Memorial weekend run, the BDOutdoors brief boils down to: get out early, watch the afternoon wind, hunt bait on deep structure for the calicos and sandbass, and keep one eye on the back side of Clemente.
