Fishing season gets underway with rockfish opener
You could say Saturday is the real rockfish opener, since that's when most everyone will be off work and have time to go fishing. There's a bit of a storm moving in on Wednesday but the forecast discussion from the National Weather Service's Oxnard/Los Angeles tells it all:

"FLAT WESTERLY FLOW ON THURSDAY WILL PUSH WHAT EVER IS LEFT OF WEDNESDAYS STORM AWAY. CANNOT RULE OUT SOME PREDAWN SHOWERS IF ANY OF THE SLOWER MDLS COME TRUE BUT OTHERWISE LOOK FOR DECREASING CLOUDS AND A SLIGHT WARMING TREND.

"FRIDAY AND SATURDAY STILL LOOK WONDERFUL AS A NICE UPPER HIGH BUILDS IN. WEAK OFFSHORE FLOW WILL KEEP ANY COASTAL CLOUDS AWAY AND ASSIST IN WARMING THE CSTS/VLY. OVERALL LOOK FOR CLEAR SKIES AND MAX TEMPS WARMING INTO THE 70S ACROSS THE COASTS AND VLYS."

You couldn't have a better forecast for jumping aboard an overnight trip Friday night or an early morning all-day or 3/4-day trip Saturday morning and filling a sack with some tasty reds. No lings, though. A check of the DFG website showed that the 2011/2012 groundfish regs are still postponed. You can't get anyone to talk about it, so it sounds like a lawsuit.

So that means you have to go by the 2010 regulations until further notice and in that case lingcod season doesn't open until April 1 and fishing tomorrow will have to be in the same depths as last year.

There will be plenty of live squid available for bait, with both Shawn Steward of the Aloha Spirit and Rick Craddick of the Black Pearl reporting they have the squish. Craddick told SFR that there was a full speed daytime snag on squid down by the Deep Hole today, while Steward went out and got them to come to the crowder under the lights at night.

The chance at an exotic might be pretty slim, with water temperatures at the Channel Islands right at 54 degrees. Craddick said when made the run up from San Diego to Channel Isles Harbor in Oxnard the warmest water he found was 57 degrees. Of course that didn't stop his deckhand from soaking a squid in hopes of seabass while they were making bait.

Squid is a favorite of reds, but I'm sure plenty of folks will be dropping down drop Berkley's Gulp! baits, Shimano's Lucanus bugs and Butterfly jigs or old favorites like a Jax Jig or a white Scampi twin tail. The white metal is more associated with seabass, but I have had great success on white Salas 6x Jrs. and PL 68s. When we were checking out the rockfish boats in Brookings this winter, one of the boats had all their rent rocks rigged with a long white curl tail grub.

Whatever works this rockfish season, the best part is we'll finally have boats out fishing the SoCal Bight from San Diego to Santa Barbara and that means the reports and counts should be flowing in daily to to both the SportfishingReport.com home page and SFR iPhone app -- your source for up to the minute updates.

Weather permitting, of course, but it looks like Mother Nature has given us a permit to fish most of this week.