It’s Monday morning, raining and the view from my cubicle that usually stares out at Catalina Island looks more like a nuclear winter thanks to socked in fog along the San Clemente coastline. In short, winter is here.

Yesterday was the first day of winter, but based on some of the fishing that’s been going on, it’s almost like spring. Well, at least for local boats fishing out of L.A. Landings. The Enterprise had both barracuda and bonito over the weekend on its ¾-day trips out of Long Beach Marina Sportfishing. Up the road at Pierpoint, the Southern Cal has been stringing together some great day on both the bonito and sand bass — they have had limits of both on the half-day runs recently.

Sand bass have actually been chewing pretty darn good for L.A. boats, both on the Horseshoe and up in the Santa Monica Bay. Fresh dead or frozen squid fished on leadheads has been the way to try and get the bass out of the structure. Brutal and sand bass aren’t word that usually go together, but when it comes to fishing them in heavy structure, things can get pretty unforgiving.

THE LEADHEAD AND SQUID is a great way to fish bass.


“There was a guy that come off the boat (Southern Cal) that said he had to fish 40-pound to get them,” said James Tani at Pierpoint in Long Beach yesterday. Same story up in the bay. Staff at Marina del Rey Sportfishing said they like to see anglers fishing 30-pound for the leadhead/squid structure sand bass.

The past few weeks I’ve been talking to David Dodge about writing a piece on structure sand bass. He has won bass tourneys up and down the coast many times over, and he might just have big sand bass dialed in more than anyone else.



Look for the article in WON sometime after the new year.