LJ 10/10 report and Rare sighting!
 

Launched at 6:00am and began peddling around for the first 40min to discover the kelp bed mysteriously disappeared? First time seeing it gone this far north in my whole life so I decided to fish around the boiling smelt. Caught one 18"-20" wsb on a 4" swimbait then fished around kelp for sheephead the rest of the day. Got a bunch of sheep and small calicos. When I was reeling in my FIRST male sheep head:luxhello:(finally the hunt for a male is over) about 16-17" in length a Gargantuan Calico comes up and swallows 1/2 of my sheephead!! I thought it was a Bsb until I noticed the distinctive calico pattern. Including the waters magnification it was about 3 1/4' long and as thick as two footballs set side by side. Fortunately and unfortunately I pulled my sheephead out of its mouth. Continued fishing the same spot and about 20minutes later two Homeguard :yt:were furiously playing tag inches below my yak! Definitely made me hoot and hollar as my yak was shaking side to side and I was getting soaked! I tried to dip my gopro in the water but as soon as I did it must've spooked them. Landed at 2. Fun day on the water overall thanks to those two awesome sightings!

I would bet on juvinile BSB :D cool to see!

https://californiaoutdoors.files.wor...sea-bass-1.jpg

Yowza!

Andy

:sifone:

Definitely not, I've caught two Bsb before, one about 40lbs and one 10ish, and it's pattern/ body structure looked way more like a calicos. I thought so at first as well. Guess I'll just have to add this to my "The one that got away" collection since I didn't get any picture/ video of it. :(

I do believe if you saw a calico bass over 3 feet long it would be an all class world record.

3 1/4' Calico Bass?


I catch'm all the time!

Could there be any chance what you saw was a Broomtail Grouper?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5BTcoaGW1e...anama+rica.jpg

I suppose its possible. The pattern looks semi similar to what I saw but the tail was definitely not as big as a broomtail's from what I could see. Forgive me if i'm wrong but don't those live way down south?

Including the waters magnification and 10-15' down, yeah. Not sure how big that would be out of the water.

So do Wahoo, right? This is the year that anything can happen. The reason it came to mind is I kind of recall Broomtail are protected in CA. Your story happens to sound very "grouper-like" and when I googled Broomtail it came back with stuff that didn't look all that far off from calico pattern-wise.

I've never seen a huge calico up close before. I'm just speculating. Seeing a Broomtail might be even more rare.

Most likely it was a briomtail https://youtu.be/VZ5_gySwBhI they do live in socal just very rare

sent from my thumbs on my G4

3.25' calico would at least double the world record. There is a small resident population of broom tail grouper in La Jolla. They're seen ocationally and I've seen a few photos. Broom tails look much more like calicos than small bsb do. Especially under water with the sun shining on them. Some fish come north seasonally then migrate back south; dodos, wahoo, even seen sierra once. Others come north perhaps as larvae or juveniles and stay, but can't reproduce; grouper and the green sea turtles in south SD Bay. Some come and set up reproducing populations; like short fin corvina and bone fish. If you saw a broom tail you're lucky and if it was a massive calico, that's lucky too. Mike

Your absolutely right! Its definitely possible it was a broomtail but the only factor that makes me doubt it could have been is that broomtail don't seem like migratory fish so the thought of it traveling several hundred miles seems far and few between, even for our unusually warm water. Hell, I'd love to say it was though so i'll take your guy's word for it! Rare fish woo!

Thanks for the awesome info! Broomtail's don't seem like migratory fish so it's cool if you say they are, love learning new things about fish!

I think the deal would more likely be that you ran into a rare local as opposed to a migratory fish. =)