The Coronado Islands are four bare rocks sitting eighteen miles south of Point Loma, close enough that you can see them from the San Diego hillsides on a clear afternoon and far enough that getting there means leaving the dock at four in the morning. They also happen to be in Mexico, which is why the first piece of tackle anybody checks is a paper permit in a ziplock bag. Nothing on those islands grows taller than a shrub. There is guano, there are sea lions with strong opinions, and there is a wall of rock dropping into blue water that never quite warms up, and out of all that comes the best brawling fish on the southern California coast.
The trip is decided before you ever see the islands. Sportboats stop on the way out at a floating bait receiver off Shelter Island, and the crew scoops sardines into the tank while everybody stands at the rail pretending not to grade them. Big lively bait means the day has a chance. Small soft bait that swims in tired circles means the day is going to be about persistence. Our crew has watched grown men go quiet at that receiver the way other people go quiet at a weather report.
Yellowtail fishing on a party boat is a group project run by the deckhands, and the one working our rail had made that eighteen-mile run more mornings than he could put a number to. He had a fifteen-word vocabulary and used about nine of it. When the meter marked fish and the boat went sideways on the drift, he pointed at a swirl on the surface and said, "Throw at the boil, not where it was." Half the rail threw at where it was. The other half caught fish, which is a lesson that teaches itself faster than any lecture would.
Hooking a yellowtail is not subtle. You lob a sardine out on light line, feed it slack, and then the reel begins to give up line at a rate that makes the whole boat turn and look. A yellowtail has one plan and it is down. Straight down, into the rocks, where the leader gets a haircut and the fish keeps the hook as a souvenir. You lean on it, you walk the rail around six people who lift their rods for you, and you either turn its head in the first twenty seconds or you tell the story about the one that reached the bottom.
Ours came up along the hull a little past seven, olive back with that yellow tail lighting up under the surface like somebody had switched it on, and the deckhand gaffed it without looking excited about anything. Four fish for a full rail is a normal morning out there. On the ride back we sat on the bow with sunburned foreheads and a cooler that finally had a reason to exist, eighteen miles from breakfast and about ninety feet of monofilament from having nothing to talk about.