Water Conditions 61°F


SURFACE TEMPERATURE: LOW


63°F HIGH VISIBILITY 5'–15'


Thursday will be the best diving day of the week before the rain comes. Friday will be mostly windy with a strong west swell and some rain making conditions trashy above and below the surface for the weekend. It should be looking better for the divers by Tuesday next week. Boaters should especially keep an extra eye out for divers near the reefs and channel edges and divers always mark yourselves and area appropriately.


Visibility based on existing conditions and NOAA predicted swell and weather conditions at press time. Check up-to-date daily visibility/ conditions at the San Diego County Lifeguard info line: 619-221-8824


Moon Calendar THUR


DECEMBER


SUNRISE SUNSET


LENGTH OF DAY 15


6:44 16:45 10H 1M


SAT 17


6:45 16:45 10H 0M


MON 19


6:46 16:46 10H 0M


WED 21


6:47 16:47 10H 0M


Steve Capps with his 16.41-pound lunker


watching fleet, the gray is their darling. Scripps-Birch Aquarium naturalists pro- vide professional narration aboard Flagship Cruises’ educational trips that begin this Satur- day, December 17, and run through mid-April. — Daniel Powell


Dixon Lake’s record- breaking trout


December 2 was opening day for Dixon Lake’s annual Trout Derby. Six thousand pounds of Nebraska Tailwalker rainbows were stocked earlier in the week.


At 10:30 a.m., Seaton Stroud of Big Bear City came running up to the weigh station from Dock #4 with a 13.89-pound rainbow trout, caught on a worm. “I can’t believe it, man, I can’t believe it! And on two-pound test!” he said, shaking, panting.


Stroud’s trout broke the previous derby FISH REPORT Head: Wintertime blues? No yellows? Try ocean whitefish.


Inshore: I think this is the first weekly report I’ve done in two years that doesn’t have a yellowtail in the local counts. Still, a few were caught off La Jolla by kayakers and private boaters and they continue to show in the long-range counts. Closer to home, it’s all about rockfish, sheephead and whitefish. The latter are a very hard-fighting and tasty species of tilefish that reside on the flats near reefs in 60 to 200 feet of water. Whitefish feed on


record of 13.6 pounds, set in 2011 by Oceans- ide’s Sam Arnold.


Stroud’s new record would stand for only 29 hours. Around 3:30 p.m. on December 3, Steve Capps of Escondido set a new derby record and a new Dixon Lake record — a 16.41-pounder. The lunker was caught in Trout Cove with a new flavor of Gulp fishing bait: salmon egg rainbow.


— Ken Harrison


The cost of Bermuda Beach bluff


The owners of three buildings above an Ocean Beach pocket beach known as Bermuda Beach are set to pay a mitigation fee of $82,000. The property owners are going to spend a lot more to build seawalls along 125 feet of coast to stop the continuing collapse of the bluffs that started last year after a December rainstorm.


People get here from Pescadero Ave. stairs or Cable St. ramp


“The bluff there is still failing,” says Rob- ert Trettin, the land-use consultant working with the owners. “[Recently], another chunk of bluff fell.”


A 13-unit condo building, a duplex, and a 5-unit building are nearly at the edge of the failing bluff, part of which was shored up in April of this year with an emergency Califor- nia Coastal Commission permit, Trettin said. The collapse earlier this year severely


damaged the staircase down to the beach at the end of Bermuda, though people still make their way there from the sturdy concrete stairs at Pescadero Avenue or the boat-launch- ramp-like road at the end of Cable Street. “There was a house seaward of the four


units when it was built,” Trettin said. “That went away a while back.”


Ocean Beach and Sunset Cliffs have a long history of building near the edge and armoring


small crustaceans and will readily bite squid strips. They have a relatively small mouth, so I tend to go with a smaller hook than normal. Generally, a dropper-loop type setup with the weight on the bottom and a couple of 6” loops 18” apart above the weight with #2 live bait hooks works best for me. Cut the squid into strips about 2” long and pin it on so it ‘flags’ in the current. Ocean whitefish will give a hard jerking fight and feel much larger than they are, not unlike a small lingcod. Ocean whitefish filets are very good baked, in ceviche or batter-fried for tacos. The average whitefish is about 1 pound in our area, though they


seawalls, installing splash walls, or putting in huge rip-rap boulders on the beach to deflect wave energy from the mostly sand bluffs. The Surfrider Foundation, which has fought bluff armoring in Encinitas and Solana Beach, doesn’t plan to oppose the O.B. seawalls, according to policy manager Julia Chunn-Heer. She said the Coastal Act of 1972 came into effect long after the area was armored. The 14-unit building on Bermuda Avenue was at the heart of creating a special assessment district called the Oceanus Geo- logical Hazard Assessment District in 2010 to save up for precisely this kind of emergency, according to city documents.


But locals say they apparently haven’t saved enough — despite the extraordinary monthly homeowners’ association fees of $500 a month for a one-bedroom condo.


— Marty Graham can get to over 10 pounds.


Outside: The Oceanside 95 has made a couple trips this past week to Cortez Bank with limited success on the bluefin tuna still holding there. For the 1.5 to 3 day boats, the pelagic fishing has slowed quite a bit and the focus is now on rockfish while they look about for any surface activity. There has been little in the northern zone offshore, though some decent homeguard yellowtail and good calico fishing can be had off the inshore kelps south of Colinet and around San Martin Island. Further south, the pelagic fishing picks up as you get to the Cedros


San Diego Reader December 15, 2016 43


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