BY ALLEN “BUSHY” BUSHNELL
MONTEREY BAY – Today’s report highlights a couple notable catches from the Santa Cruz area this week. Fishing has been very good nearshore, and the promise of big bluefin is a very real proposition, if and when the weather calms down.
The first might be my favorite. Malakai Armenta is a local boy who was captured by the fishing fever within the past couple years. He’s been haunting the beaches near Santa Cruz, following the birds and the bait. His diligence paid off this week when he landed a 42-inch, 20-pound striper from a local beach in Santa Cruz. “I just followed the bait, the boilers and the birds and just got lucky. Definitely my biggest striper yet.”
Armenta was using a Daiwa SP Minnow and just burning it in, including a few pops every five to 10 seconds. He was using 15-pound leader. He reported, “I knew I had hooked something a lot bigger and faster than most the other smaller juvenile bass I’ve gotten from the beach. I learned that I need some thicker line next time. I was super scared of losing that beast. I was scared I wasn’t gonna be able to at least get an eye on it just because the way my reel was screaming. It was about a 10-minute battle but felt like a eternity just because how scared I was to break off. The second I finally got him to the sand, I could only see a huge silhouette and my bait barely hooked. I looked closer but really, It was the bent trouble hooks on my bait that had me stressing. I waited and measured it and it came to be 21 pounds 42 inches. It took deathly grinding to catch that 40-inch bass!”
Erik Andreassen has been noted in this report fairly often recently. He runs a smaller two to four-person charter service from the Santa Cruz Harbor. The business name is The Big Anchovy, and most harbor denizens call Eric by the same name. Adreassen has been racking up on nice halibut recently, but hit the jackpot this week with a true tanker of a white sea bass. His report declared, “I got a real one!” They were drifting live mackerel at mid-water in the 120 foot depths towards Capitola when action on the scope caught his attention. “Our bait was down at 70 feet and when I saw the fish on my Garmin it was around 60, but streaking downward!! The bass grabbed the bait and kept on going to the bottom where he dogged it for a long time. Then, after a few really strong runs, we finally got him to the boat and on the gaff.” The lucky anglers aboard were John Boveri from Pacifica, a regular on the boat. His friend Ezio Vermiglio was visiting from North Carolina, and was the lucky man on the rod for the big sea bass, which weighed in at 54 pounds.
