Late on the first day of fishing, we found one of those kelp paddies you dream about — a tangle of weed holding yellowtail so thick you could see them flashing under the boat. The bite was on, and it stayed on right up until the light went orange.
Before we pulled off the paddy for the night, the captain marked the spot. And I'll admit what I was thinking as we ran off it: we've got them now. Come back at first light, do the whole thing over again.
We came back at dawn. The paddy was still there. The yellowtail were gone.
That empty water taught me more about yellowtail than the 91 fish we put over the rail on this trip. But let's start with the trip itself.
The trip in numbers
This was a 2.5-day run on the Horizon out of H&M Landing in San Diego — an open-party, sponsored trip with Izorline, 310 Rodworks, and Something's Fishy along for the ride and a steady stream of giveaways to keep the deck loose. Twenty-one anglers, three sponsors, one very busy crew.
If you haven't done one, a 2.5-day trip is three nights on the ocean and two full days of fishing. You leave at night and run straight through the dark to the grounds, so you don't wet a line until the first morning. That first morning is when this trip came alive.
The math at the end: 91 yellowtail and one lonely dorado across the boat. Not a wide-open, fish-on-every-drop slugfest — but a genuinely good count for a 2.5-day in early June, spread across enough anglers that nobody went home empty-handed. We worked Mexican waters below the border, hopping kelp paddies and picking apart the better ones.
I personally landed two yellows — roughly a 20-pounder and a 25-pounder. The standout fish belonged to other anglers, with several solid ones over 30 pounds coming over the rail. That's the quality range that makes a June yellowtail trip worth the price of admission.
Want to see which boats are putting up yellowtail right now? The live fish counts on /intel update nightly across all 21 SoCal landings.
Captain Jodie's return
Worth a moment here: this year marked Captain Jodie's return to the fleet after a five-year hiatus. Jodie is widely considered one of the sharpest captains in the fleet — deeply knowledgeable about the grounds and genuinely dialed into the anglers on the boat, which is a rarer combination than it should be.
You feel the difference with a captain like that. It's not just finding fish; it's reading the day, calling the moves, and putting the boat on the better water when the bite goes quiet. A lot of why this trip produced came down to the wheelhouse.
The clearest proof came early. A lot of us had booked this run with bluefin tuna on the brain — that's the fish the 2.5-day window had us dreaming about. But the bluefin didn't show; they'd scattered, the way they do. Rather than burn the whole trip chasing a ghost, Jodie made a last-minute call to drop the bluefin hunt and commit fully to yellowtail. It would have been easy to keep gambling on the glamour fish and hope they reappeared. Switching the game plan was 1000% the right move — and once it changed, we stuck to it. That's the difference between 91 yellowtail on the deck and a long, quiet ride home.
What was working: bait, iron, and timing
The bite ran on live bait, period. We were fishing big live sardines — healthy 6-to-10-inch baits — and that's what did the heavy lifting. We also had some live squid aboard, which is always a nice card to have in your hand when the yellows get picky.
The jigs produced too, just not at the same clip. Surface iron earned a few bites, and yo-yo jigs put fish on the deck when we marked them deeper under the paddies. If you're new to it: surface iron is your fast retrieve up top, and the yo-yo is the heavy iron you drop to the marks and crank vertically. Both have their windows. But when the sardines are this size and this lively, most people are going to fish a flylined bait and be right to.
The other half of the equation was timing. That first morning came in hot — an hour or two of fast, quality fishing before it tapered off. From there, we spent the day traveling and paddy hopping, picking at fish here and there. Then, about an hour before sunset, we pulled up on a paddy that lit up into the best bite I've seen — in numbers and in the size of the fish both. That's the rhythm of it: the gray-light windows at each end of the day are where the magic tends to happen, with a lot of searching in between.
Browse open yellowtail trips across San Diego and beyond on /trips and filter by species to find your window.
The gear lesson (and an honest caveat)
Here's where I'll be straight with you, because I made the mistake myself: I started too light.
Day one I was fishing 25-pound line, and it cost me a fish. Yellowtail don't fight dirty the way a tuna does, but a good one will bury you in the kelp or just wear through light line over a long fight. After that, I moved up to 30- and 40-pound setups for the rest of the trip and stopped losing fish I should've landed. Hooks were in the 2/0 to 4/0 range, sized to the bait.
For what it's worth, my personal rig was Fishing Syndicate rods paired with Penn Gen 1 Fathom reels — a 30 and a 40 narrow. The 40 narrow honestly ran a little big for this class of fish, but it didn't stop me from landing what I hooked. That's the real takeaway, though, and I want to be clear about it: gear varied wildly across the 21 anglers on this boat, and everyone was catching fish. Different rods, different reels, different line. The common thread wasn't the brand on the blank — it was fresh bait, a sharp hook, and line heavy enough to do the job.
So don't read this as a shopping list. Read it as: don't go too light, match your hook to your bait, and fish what you trust.
New to charter fishing and not sure what to bring? Our Beginner's Guide to SoCal Charter Fishing walks through the basics.
Why that paddy was empty at dawn
Now back to that marked paddy.
Coming back to a hot spot at first light feels like a sure thing. But it treats yellowtail like they're tied to a location, and they're not. Yellowtail are nomadic. A kelp paddy is structure that drifts on the current, holding bait and shade — and the fish relate to the conditions, not to a GPS mark. Overnight, the paddy moved, the bait moved, the current shifted, and the school that had been stacked under it at sunset was somewhere else entirely by the time the sun came up.
That's the whole game with these fish. You're not hunting a reef that's been there for a thousand years. You're chasing a moving target that's following bait and temperature breaks across open water. The captains who consistently produce aren't returning to yesterday's spot — they're reading today's conditions and finding today's fish. Yesterday's hot paddy is a memory, not a map.
It's also exactly why yellowtail are such a satisfying fish to chase. You earn them every single day.
And on this trip, day two made you earn them. That empty paddy set the tone: the second day was a grind, the boat covering miles and miles of open water, searching for fish that didn't want to be found. It was grim across the fleet — grim enough that some boats gave up on yellowtail and switched to rockfishing just to put something in the sacks.
The Horizon kept hunting. Captain Jodie and crew stayed on the yellowtail, and the boat still scratched out about ten more before the day was done. In my book that was absolutely the right call: nobody on board booked a rockfishing trip, and grinding out a few more yellows on a tough day is exactly the kind of dedication that separates a good crew from a great one. They came to put us on the fish everyone signed up for, and they did.
SoCal yellowtail in context
Yellowtail are, in my opinion, the most reliable gamefish SoCal has to offer. Bluefin get the headlines and the long-range glory, but yellows are the bread-and-butter target that show up year after year, within reach of a half-day to a 2.5-day budget, and fight hard enough to make a believer out of anyone.
That said, I try to be honest about what the data does and doesn't show. Yellowtail counts swing season to season and week to week with water temperature, bait, and where the paddies set up — some years are noticeably leaner than others, and a single great trip doesn't tell you what the whole season looks like.
If you want the current picture rather than my anecdote, the live fish counts on /intel show what's actually coming over the rails this week across the region.
How to chase yellowtail yourself
If you want to go put your own yellowtail story together, here's the short version of what this trip reinforced:
- Pick the right trip length. Half-days and full-days can score yellows close to home, but the offshore paddy bite below the border usually means an overnight or 1.5-to-2.5-day. Match the trip to where the fish are. (Not sure which to book? See our Half Day vs Full Day vs Overnight guide.)
- Don't go too light. Start at 30, have a 40 ready. Losing a good fish to undersized line is the most avoidable mistake out there.
- Fish fresh bait well. A lively sardine fished naturally beats a perfectly cast jig more often than not. Have iron ready for the windows when it shines.
- Fish the light. Sunrise and sunset are your money hours. Be at the rail and ready.
- Trust the captain over the GPS. The fish move. Let someone reading today's water do the finding.
That's it. None of it is secret, and all of it took me a lost fish and an empty paddy at dawn to fully appreciate.
Wrapping up
Ninety-one yellowtail, one dorado, two fish for me, and one genuinely good lesson about how these fish actually live. The Horizon ran a tight trip, Jodie's return lived up to the reputation, and the sponsors kept the deck having fun the whole way. If you've been on the fence about a yellowtail trip this season, this is the time of year to go.
We publish a fresh SoCal sportfishing forecast at the start of every month — and we track live fish counts across 21 landings every single night. Sign up free to get the weekly digest in your inbox, so the next time the yellowtail show up thick, you'll know before you're standing on the dock wondering where everybody went.
— Keith Leonard, Find Your Next Catch