Weather and sea conditions are becoming milder, which is normal for August and September on the Monterey Bay. What that means for anglers is more days of fishing, longer fishing days and more remote locations becoming available. Boats can go farther for fish because they don’t have t fight the ocean in order to get back home.

In Monterey, that usually means heading down to Big Sur. Chris Arcoleo at Chris’ fishing Trips always has a preference to send his boats past Point Pinos and towards Big Sur. Often heavier winds or swell means they’re held to fishing the reefs off 17-Mile Drive and Carmel.   That's not bad news, those reefs can be very productive and Chris’ fish counts for the past couple weeks bear witness to that fact. They’ve pretty much limited out ever day, every trip.

With the swell virtually nonexistent in Monterey this week, halibut have begun to filter back into the shallower waters near DelMonte Beach, the “Hotel” area and Sand City. A vast sand area bordered by underwater shell beds in the 60-120 foot depths is perfect habitat for the big flatfish as well as sole and sand dabs. The shell beds also hold larger rock fish and lingcod to round out an angler’s bag.

Santa Cruz continues to enjoy great halibut fishing this season. This week the hot bite was from Capitola down to Pajaro in 60-70 feet of water.   There’s still plenty of halibut caught from Pleasure Point up to wilder’s Ranch off the North Coast. Monterey enjoyed a brief flurry of white sea bass a couple weeks ago as big squid spawns occurred in that area. Right now the commercial seiner boats are working the squid every night below Capitola. Exactly where the halibut bite is best. We’ve received no reports of sea bass from that area, which is surprising. It may be that the fleet is just so condensed over the spawn areas that’s it’s impossible to flyline live squid which is the proven method of taking the tanker seabass.

Incredibly, salmon are still firmly in the mix. The best reports came from anglers trolling deep while fishing below Moss Landing. While the salmon bite is not “hot,” they are still available and we would not be surprised to see a few more pulses occur soon as new schools enter the bay.