Tomales Bay is a long, skinny finger of saltwater an hour north of San Francisco, with dairy hills on one side and a national seashore on the other. Most people come for the oysters. They eat a dozen at a picnic table, look at the water, and drive home without ever wondering what lives under it. What lives under it is California halibut, lying flat on the sand with both eyes on one side of their heads, waiting for something careless to swim over.
I went in early October with a neighbor I will call Dale, who rents the same aluminum skiff every fall and talks to it like a horse. The fog was down on the water when we launched, thick enough that the far shore was a rumor. Dale said the fog was good. Dale says everything is good until about eleven, when he revises his position. We spent the first hour jigging up live bait near the eelgrass, small smelt and anchovies, and Dale handled each one like it was on loan.
Halibut fishing in the bay is drifting, and drifting is mostly waiting with extra steps. You pin a live bait on a sliding sinker rig, drop it to the sand in fifteen feet of water, and let the tide carry the boat along the edge of the channel. Then you hold the rod and do nothing, which is harder than it sounds. A halibut does not hit a bait. It leans on it. The rod tip gets heavy, as if you have hooked a wet towel, and everything in your body tells you to swing. Dale's rule is to count to ten first. I swung at three, twice, and reeled up two baits with a clean set of tooth marks and no opinions.
The third time I counted, out loud, while Dale nodded like a piano teacher. At ten I lifted and the wet towel woke up. A halibut fights in short, sulking runs along the bottom, and then it comes up flat and suddenly decides the net is an insult. This one went twenty six inches, a legal fish by a comfortable margin, brown as the sand it came off and white as a dinner plate underneath. Dale netted it headfirst and said good, and for once it was before eleven.
We took one more and lost one at the boat, which Dale blamed on the fog, then the tide, then me, in that order. By noon the sun burned through and the hills turned gold and the bite went quiet. On the drive out we stopped for oysters like everybody else. The man shucking them asked if we had caught anything. Dale said a couple. The man said he did not know there were fish in there, and Dale told him that was good too.
Cold water days are hoodie days. See our custom boat hoodies and sweatshirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.