Catalina Island sits twenty two miles off the Southern California coast, close enough to see on a clear day and far enough that the water around it runs bluer and warmer than anything along the mainland. In September the island is at its best. The tourist boats thin out, the swell lies down, and the yellowtail move up along the kelp beds on the backside to eat squid and sardines. Everybody who fishes out of Long Beach or San Pedro knows this, and on a good weekend there are more boats off the island than there are parking spots in Avalon.
A California yellowtail is a jack, which is a family of fish known mostly for being unreasonable. It is built like a torpedo with a yellow stripe painted down its side, and it has exactly one plan when it feels a hook, which is to turn and swim as hard as it can into the nearest kelp. The kelp off Catalina grows up from forty or fifty feet of water in thick brown columns, and a yellowtail that gets into it will wrap your line around three stalks and leave you attached to a plant.
So the fishing is mostly about the first ten seconds. Our skipper, a sunburned man who had been running the island for longer than he would admit, anchored up tight to the edge of a kelp line, chummed a few scoops of live sardines, and told us what would happen. A fish would eat. We would have to lock the drag down nearly all the way and pull, hard, before it turned. He called it stopping the fish. Everyone on deck nodded like they understood. None of us did.
The first yellowtail ate a sardine and was in the kelp before its owner had finished saying the word fish. The second went the same way. The third, on a rod I was holding, ran about twenty yards, turned toward the kelp, and I leaned back with everything I had, and for a long moment neither of us moved. Then it came around. Fifteen minutes later a solid twenty two pound fish came over the rail, green and gold and furious, and I was sitting on the cooler trying to remember how my arms worked.
We finished the afternoon with six yellowtail in the box and something like fourteen lost to the kelp, which the skipper said was about average. On the ride home the island went purple behind us and he mentioned, casually, that the kelp wins most days. It did not seem to bother him. He was not the one holding the rods.
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