A Calm Day in Carmel
14 Dec 2025
Today the surf forecast called for once-in-a-season calm seas, and thus I decided to make the long drive down to Carmel. As always, the Monterey County coast made for glorious scenery, and the cloud-free sky made for an added bonus relative to all the fog that’s been sitting over the bay these days.
Since I was by myself I wanted to take some time to explore a bit, and pull over at a couple of the turnouts I haven’t been to before in Garrapata. However, I wasn’t super comfortable fishing these new spots, as all of them involved some level of scrambling to get down that I wasn’t entirely sure was safe to do by myself. I might bring a rope next time… Anyways, itching to get fishing, I ended up pivoting to an old spot that I haven’t fished in around 5 years. Some of the access seems to have eroded since the last time I was here, there were definitely some slippy parts that in hindsight maybe were not the smartest to do myself.
Nevertheless, the fishing was alright. This particular spot has a bunch of rocks just off shore that make it a bit tough to swimbait, so I ended up sticking to bait. On strips of squid on a hi-lo rig, I nabbed two very nice black-and-yellows, safely returned to the water. I also caught two baby cabezon that were definitely a little overconfident relative to the size of the shrimp pieces they were trying to grab.
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| A fat black-and-yellow | Over-confident baby cabezon |
I wanted to try and catch some black/blue rockfish so I ended up moving to a spot with a bit nicer access to deep water. Previously I had done pretty well there, but I threw around a Z-Man Slim SwimZ for about an hour with little success. At around sunset, I ended up catching a couple baby blue rockfish on shrimp chunks - I’ll have to find the schools of bigger ones next time…
Check out our fishing guide for this spot.