Bait

[NICKWORN]

Originally Posted by govomit

That may be enough to explain the void. As confirmed many times OTW and on this forum, south-to-north current wipes out all fish in LJ.
I wish we could use a good source for local ocean current info, but it seems non-existent.

I went out saturday to strickly make bait for future lobster trips, and headed to the usual pier spot for hardly any action( couple here and there ), headed west to some birds working and came across the mother load of bait balls. 30 mackerel in 5 min and 1 almost landed Yellowtail on the sabiki, broke off 20ft from boat( i use the bigger 4 hooked saboki with 30lb main/20lb branch). im assuming as I was pulling maks off my one rod, the yellow came and smashed a mak caught on my other sabiki.

So the the bait is there, u just have to work for it, dont think the current pushes bait out of the area, just tends to push it out from the usual MLPA line that everyone is accustomed to.

[LSmoot]

I was fishing LJ yesterday (Oct. 9th, '17). The bait was hard to find, but I managed 2 greenbacks. I caught them directly west of the beach and maybe 200 yards or so west of the MLPA line. All around the kelp perimeter were what appeared to be bait on my fish finder, and I wondered why these schools weren't biting my Sibiki! Turns out, they weren't macs, but were in fact White Fish. Schools and schools of them. They weren't interested in the Sabiki, until I added some squid.

For me, the biggest factors to catching bait are 1) have a fish finder, 2) know what bait looks like on the fish finder (which isn't always easy as I learned yesterday), and 3) keep moving around until you find it (if you're not catching, keep moving). I feel like when I do these things, my bait chances go up tremendously.

Good luck.