Blue Rockfish Archives - Pier Fishing in California

Monterey Municipal Wharf #2

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required The floating docks of Monterey Harbor and the pilings beneath Municipal Wharf II provide a rich and diverse community created largely by human activity. Such communities have imaginatively been called “accidental zoos.”… At low tide the pilings, shaded…

Monterey Coast Guard Pier aka Coast Guard Jetty

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required John Steinbeck called it “the hour of the pearl.” It’s “the gray time,” he wrote in Cannery Row, “after the light has come and before the sun has risen—the interval between day and night when time stops and…

Santa Cruz Wharf

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required When I first sat down to write about this pier, I almost didn’t know where to start. Should I talk about the pier itself, the municipal wharf built in 1913, the wharf which is the longest of the…

Morro Bay South T-Pier

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required Sitting just a few hundred yards south of the North T-Pier, the South T-Pier is slightly larger and seems to be seeing an increasing proportion of the local pier anglers choose it as home. Perhaps this is due…

Blue Rockfish

Scorpionfishes and Rockfishes: Family Scorpaenidae Species: Sebastes mystinus (Jordan & Gilbert, 1881); from the Greek words sebastes (magnificent) and mystas (priest, referring to the dark color of a priest’s clothing). Alternate Names: Often called blue bass, blue fish, blue perch and reef perch; also confused…

Port View Park Pier — Oakland

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required Called the Seventh Street Pier by most locals, this pier offers a pleasant park setting and some of the best fishing in this area of the bay. It is one of the best piers to fish at night,…

Citizen’s Dock — Crescent City

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required Every pier has its story and one of the most interesting here took place during a visit in 1997. I had arrived late in the afternoon, checked into the motel, and headed straight over to the dock for…

Avila Beach Pier

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required (Currently closed and probably destined to be closed until at least 2020) Every oceanfront pier in California has, at one time or another, had to be rebuilt or at least in great part repaired and renovated. Winter storms…

Elephant Rock Pier — Tiburon

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required When opened in the early 1960s, this pier was “dedicated to all girls and boys under 16 years of age who love to fish.” In fact, no one was supposed to fish on the pier who was over…

Port San Luis Pier (Harford Pier) — Avila Beach

Public Pier — No Fishing License Required Just up the road from the Avila Beach Pier sits the Port San Luis Pier, a pier with a different environment and a totally different feeling. The Avila Beach Pier looks and feels like a southern California “beach”…