San Diego & SoCal Fishing Forums

Started out with a Friday evening session with the fam, spent the majority of the time showing my son everything I’ve been learning so far and watched him pull in a perch even smaller than the ones I’ve been catching, a couple normal size perch, and a huge guitarfish. Fun watching him fight that one onto shore!

Saturday morning brought another guitar fish (for me) and a bunch of perch. Nothing of note but the quantity was fun.

Sunday morning started with a big perch early on, 12” or so. Caught it on clam, which I tried for the first time. Reasonably successful with clam as it pulled in an additional perch or two. Switched to crabs once they came out and pulled in a small corbina, small YFC, and a handful more perch.

All in all a successful weekend with lots of fish caught. Little bit more grass than I’d like, especially Saturday and Sunday mornings, but it was manageable.

Think I’m gonna get a reel spooled with braid next weekend just to try something different, learn something new.

Thanks for the report. Gosh, both Pacific and Mission beaches have been dealing with a lot of kelp/eel grass this summer but there also sure has been some good reports of spotfin and nice halibut for the folks finding clear spots between the curd!

Sounds like some fun outings! Those guitarfish pull hard too.

And... you got a reply from Bill Varney too!

Thanks for the report Joe. It's been rough for past month or so. I mentioned to Varney & if you listened/read his report last week, he believes the water temps are a tad too warm resulting in sand crabs (and fish) moving north. I think it also causes the heavy grass/kelp conditions. I recall we went through this same scenario last year, same time, then fishing picked up mid September and was good through mid November.

Perch killer wrote: Mon Sep 08, 2025 11:07 am Thanks for the report Joe. It's been rough for past month or so. I mentioned to Varney & if you listened/read his report last week, he believes the water temps are a tad too warm resulting in sand crabs (and fish) moving north. I think it also causes the heavy grass/kelp conditions. I recall we went through this same scenario last year, same time, then fishing picked up mid September and was good through mid November.

Thank you both for point out and reminding me of this resource. I just now subscribed to him on YouTube to start listening to these reports! Definitely good to keep a pulse on things to know if being successful (or not) is a result of my own actions, general conditions, both, neither, etc.