A Wavy Labor Day in Carmel

---

01 Sep 2025

Finally made it down to Carmel! My friend and I left home at around 8am, and a couple of coffee-fueled pitstops later, we made it to our first fishing spot at 10am. I haven’t been back to this spot in a little, but it seems like a lot of the cliff has somewhat eroded, making it a bit more dangerous to clamber down (if you’re ever going to go rock fishing, make sure you don’t go alone). We were hoping that this roadblock would decrease the fishing pressure, but it did not seem to translate to better fish catches — I couldn’t get away from tiny baby blue rockfish, except for a single pan-sized one that I guess was the king of the pack:

A dink blue rockfish	The head honcho

Since the action was pretty quiet in terms of bigger fish, we decided to switch spots. Unfortunately the water was fairly rough today, so combined with the tide that had been rising all day, our options were somewhat limited in terms of safe places to fish. We eventually ended up at a spot I had checked out a couple weeks back with another friend, that has a nice platform about 15 ft off the water that provides really nice protection of the waves. Here, we loaded up on quite a few small-to-medium blue rockfish that were eager to hit a Z-Man Slim SwimZ — nothing to write home about, but still some good fun. I also caught one decent black rockfish working the Z-Man on a dropshot rig.

The one non-blue rockfish of the day

The Z-Man did well today. I don’t think I lost a single one of the plastics today despite the large number of bites, except to snags that took the rest of my rig too. At least for now, I think I’ll stick to Elaztech for any future soft plastic purchases…

Check out our fishing guide for this spot.