Ben Cantrell's fish species blog: Red tide rockfishing in La Jolla

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Red tide rockfishing in La Jolla

Red tides are gross. For the past few weeks southern California has been dealing with phytoplankton blooms all up and down the coast. The organisms that cause them are called dinoflagellates. They turn the water an opaque reddish brown, they stink, and they use up oxygen in the water, leading to fish kills in the lagoons. As far as I know they don't affect bottom fishing though, so I headed out to La Jolla yesterday to try for more deep canyon fish. I started out in the center of the canyon targeting anything but rockfish. I didn't feel any bites, but I did have one hook come up with its squid missing, so maybe there's something down there!

After a few hours of entertaining the fish at 1000 feet with my excellent jigging techniques, I made the call to come up to legal rockfish depths of 450 feet or less. I dropped at a few spots along the canyon's edge, but the only bites I got were from small halfbanded rockfish. Everything changed though when I swapped my squid out for shrimp. Instant bites!

Vermilion Rockfish (Sebastes miniatus)

Edit: The vermilions in this post are probably the closely related sunset rockfish, Sebastes crocotulus. From what I've read, adult fish in less than 328 feet are usually vermilions, and those in more than 328 feet are sunsets. Sunsets also tend to have a yellowish-orange hue to their sides, whereas vermilions are more of a brick red.

I switched to a 6 oz jig with a teaser circle hook about 12 inches above it and added shrimp to both of the hooks. The jig only caught one fish, the small vermilion in the picture below. All of the other fish caught were on the teaser hook.

After a few more vermilions I pulled up a small, bright red rockfish that I didn't recognize. I made a note of the depth (425 feet) and took lots of photos to make sure I could ID it when I got home. Eventually I settled on pinkrose rockfish, and just to be safe I had Milton Love confirm it.

Pinkrose Rockfish (Sebastes simulator) - new hook & line species #661

Shrimp on the teaser hook continued to get bites, and it only took two hours to catch my limit of 10 rockfish. Towards the end of my session there were a couple of bocaccio, and the rest of them were decent sized vermilions.

Bocaccio (Sebastes paucispinis)

Many of the fish were puking up red crabs and small shrimps, which explains why they bit so quickly on shrimp. The bocaccio were the only ones spitting up anchovies. One of them had a few hanging out of his mouth and a few pushing out through his gills.

Northern Anchovy (Engraulis mordax)

I caught my limit before 11:30, and after that I took my time paddling back. There were a lot of dolphins, including more juveniles than I've ever seen before.

I also came across a pair of harbor seals.

One of the bait boats was out working, which was good to see. Last week there was a line of them docked in San Diego Bay.

I landed on the beach shortly after noon. There were quite a few people out walking around, which wasn't surprising. I couldn't believe how many people were swimming and playing in the water though! I guess red tide isn't enough to stop people from getting in the water when they've been cooped up in their houses for the past two months.