Fifteen days ago I wrote that bluefin was the most defensible forward call in the September forecast. Last year they peaked in October, not September. They held through the month and didn't fall apart until November. If that shape repeated, I said, the best bluefin fishing of 2026 hadn't happened yet, and that's where I'd put an overnight.
Then on September 12 they fell out of our counts entirely.
Not tapered. Stopped.
The step
Here's what the fleet reported, day by day:
| Date | Bluefin | Landings reporting bluefin |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 10 | 787 | 4 |
| Sep 11 | 134 | 3 |
| Sep 12 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 13 | 6 | 2 |
| Sep 14 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 15 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 16 | 9 | 2 |
| Sep 17 | 1 | 1 |
| Sep 18 | 20 | 2 |
| Sep 19 | 0 | 0 |
Seven hundred and eighty seven fish on a Thursday, and by Saturday the species had gone quiet across the entire fleet.
The first thing I did was assume our pipeline broke. That's usually what a number like this means. It didn't. Across those same days the fleet reported normally, 17 landings on the 12th, 18 on the 19th, and every other species kept arriving. Yellowfin went up. Whatever happened on September 12, it happened in the water, not in our database.
The same boats caught a different fish
This is the part the daily numbers hide. The bluefin boats didn't stop sailing. They sailed and came back with something else.
Compare the three weeks before September 12 against the week after, by trip length:
| Trip type | BF before | YF before | BF after | YF after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.5 Day | 443 | 347 | 1 | 1,790 |
| 2 Day | 1,359 | 576 | 0 | 1,397 |
| 2.5 Day | 463 | 226 | 14 | 1,089 |
| 3 Day | 2,161 | 39 | 5 | 372 |
| 3.5 Day | 341 | 74 | 10 | 626 |
Look at the 3 Day row. Before the turn those trips were landing bluefin over yellowfin fifty to one. After, that inverted completely.
That's not a fleet that stopped fishing. That's a fleet that went out to the same grounds on the same schedule and found a different ocean.
The single best trip of 2026 happened three days after the turn. The Pride out of 22nd Street Landing ran a 1.5 day on September 15 and came back with 171 fish for 10 anglers. One hundred and twenty of them were yellowfin. It's still the top-scoring trip of the year on our board.
What came in behind them
Sea surface temperature anomaly, September 18, 2026, six days after bluefin dropped out of the counts. The Santa Barbara Channel and the waters off Point Conception are running 4 to 5 degrees Celsius above normal, with the Southern California coast at 3 to 4. Source: NOAA CoastWatch / NOAA NMFS SWFSC ERD, MUR SST Analysis Anomaly v4.1.
Warm water doesn't just push fish out. It brings fish in, and what it brought this month is genuinely strange for California.
Wahoo. Eighty three fish in the last 30 days. Seventy six of them came in the last seven. That's 92 percent of a month's worth of wahoo landing in one week, and they showed up on 17 different landing-days rather than one lucky boat.
Striped marlin. Reported on 18 separate landing-days in the last week, up from a scattered handful earlier in the month.
And then the list that made me check the data twice. In the last seven days the SoCal fleet has reported blue marlin, a shortbill spearfish, and a dozen monchong. Those are not California fish. Blue marlin and spearfish are what you fly to Kona for. Monchong is a deepwater tropical species most people who fish here have never heard of, let alone seen on a dock report.
They're here because the water is.
What I got wrong, and what I'd say now
I called the bluefin continuation and the water didn't cooperate. Worth saying plainly rather than quietly updating the forecast.
But I want to be careful about the claim I'm making now, because there are two different statements here and only one of them is supported.
What the data supports: bluefin stopped appearing in SoCal dock reports on September 12.
What it does not support: bluefin are gone. Fish are still being caught. Private boats, different grounds, trips that don't report to the sources we read. Our counts are a record of what the sport fleet publishes, and that is not the same thing as a census of the ocean. When those two diverge, the honest thing is to say which one you're looking at.
So: if you're booking in the next two to three weeks, book the trip you'd book for yellowfin and dorado, not the one you'd book for bluefin. Yellowfin is running 9,100 fish over the last week at 1.65 per angler, the best rate on the board. Dorado is at 2,700. The wahoo and the marlin are a lottery ticket on top of a trip that's already producing.
That's a different answer than I'd have given you on September 5, and the reason it changed is sitting in the table above.
Watch it yourself
Every number in this post came off our own fish counts, pulled nightly from SoCal landings and joined to the trips actually running. You can filter the same data by species, region, and time window at findyournextcatch.com/intel, and book from what you see at /trips.
If the water holds, October is going to be interesting.