12/5 SD Bay report
 

I finally boarded the bounce ball train and had my first atempt yesterday in SD Bay. The BB looks fairly strait forward but there are loads of little subtleties involved. Length of line from swivle to sinker, dodger, and hook, what lure/bait/trailer to troll, speed and depth, against/with/across the current, how often to let the ball bounce. I tried a some different combonations and ended up with 3 short halibut. I caught the fish with a 1 lb ball below a silver prism dodger and a white/green skirt with white single tail grub trailer. I'm calling it a success becasue I did land the target species with the BB technique. I'm not a great fan of trolling but I was on a hobie adventure island with the ammas deployed and that made it fairly easy, no worry of tipping over even when winding up fish and a pound of lead. I'll try it again and hopefully find some bigger models. Mike

BB - Technique
 

Try putting a Mack behind the dodger. I have consistently found that they like the cheep 6-inch squid skirts (Squidco) ahead of the bait fish. I've done really well with sardines but if the Lizard Fish are around, these get beet up pretty badly in short order and sometimes may hang on for the ride.

Congrats on a succesful mission Mike.

Thanks KeptMan, I'll try some thing organic behind the skirt next time. Does the bait does need to be alive since its just getting dragged along? Maybe a fresh dead dine/mack/chovie or one of the gulp swimmin mullets would work well. Mike

Hey Mike-

I've tried the BB technique 2x. Once on a pb with instruction from a guy in the know. We were off Mission beach. He said outside like that the water should be warmer summer time conditions. The second attempt was from my Tarpon. Not real fun or easy while paddling. I was north of of Scripps pier. I did manage a rock fish and had a Halibut follow it on the retrieve one time. I've been wanting to do it again from a pb.

Hey Sterling
I fished with Steve Mac yesterday. His boat's slowest speed is still too fast for the BB but it was so damn windy that just that moved us fast enought to work the dodger. We were south of the bridge and picked up a 10 lb hali and a nice sculpin. I have some ideas and variations I want to try and the adventure island I'm fishing from is so wide and stable I think I can fish 2 set ups to side by side test deferent rigs. Mike

The livelier the better. Usually it isn't too hard to drum up a greenback or two using a Sabiki and this will leave you with a little beer money for the BBQ. They will take horse mackerel upon occasion. I think the watermelon dodger is the key. My catch rate is 4 to 1 over the "prism" dodger. Best luck and I hope to see more paddlers out there.

Cheers, Craig