Posted on April 25, 2020

After a relaxing weekend on the bay which netted us two halibut we we're once again back at Moss Landing for another paddle deep into the canyon. Our target was the amazingly delicious Petrale Sole. To this point our best take was two petrale each and I gave Jason, practically a marathon man (see paddling distance below), his marching orders of "nothing less than 4 petale or you can't go home".

It took more than two hours to paddle out and into petrale territory but when we arrived our little fishing derby was on. I took the early lead and already had three petrale in the boat when Jason started to reel in his first. We fished for quite a while, almost 5 hours. Jason finished strong and ended up beating me 6:5 for the day.

11 petrales in total, by far our best catch yet!

I also had a strong finish and towards the end of the session caught 4 fish in the span of a few minutes, including the heaviest fish of the day, a beautiful copper rockfish. This was unexpected since we fished over sandy bottom.

We also caught about 10 sanddabs each and due to using larger circle hooks all my dabs were on the larger side.

The petrale-to-dab ratio (a new technical term) was much improved over previous trips as we progressively moved up to larger hook sizes in an attempt to filter out small dabs and to give ourselves a better chance to connect with the much larger Petrale Sole.

Distance: 18.6 miles
Duration: 10 hours


We're closing in on the marathon distance of 26.22 miles.