Cabrillo 2/18

[yakaholic]

Fished Cabrillo on Saturday and met George and Matt out there who told me about the board. Nice meeting both of you and thank you for the information you shared with me.

I got my first kayak last year and don't know why I waited so long to get one. I have been having an absolute blast on it! I recently started targeting halibut and have had some success with a decent amount of keepers topped by a 36 incher a couple months ago which I thought would be a tough mark for myself to beat...Well, that didn't hold too long...

I got off to kind of a late start and was fishing by about 9am after picking up some nice sardines from Mike at the bait dock. Ran into George shortly after getting started who already had 2 keepers. He shared some info with me and I stayed in the shallows for a while for a couple of shorts and decided to move out to deeper water where I ran into Matt who also had a keeper. Stuck it out in that area for another short and a few farmed bites but it was slow. Decided to head towards the breakwall where I had to dodge a bunch of small sail boats all over the place with a few almost ramming me. Around 2pm I started getting bit in the area in about 20ft of water and got a short and farmed a few. I had my rod in the holder while retying my other rig when line started screaming off the real. Grabbed it and felt some huge head shakes that kept making me think I lost the fish as the line would go slack every shake. Fought it for a good 10min not sure what I had until I got it to color and see a HUGE halibut. Grabbed my gaff and stuck it right in the mouth and it went nuts sending waves of water over my and and almost rolled me! Good thing the outbacks are so wide, a thinner kayak and I would have been swimming! Wish I had video, would have been awesome! Stabbed it in the head a few times to calm it down, cut its gills and headed over to the bait dock to show Mike. He measured it out at a little over 48in and we weighed it on his scale and it showed 40lbs! Weighed it on the bathroom scale when I got home and got 41lbs so definitely 40+ after being bled! Once again, it was nice meeting you guys and thanks to everyone on this site for all of the informative posts. Hope the pic comes out...