Yellowfin and dorado stack up off San Clemente as surf rebounds

What's biting

What's next

If the warm-water push holds, expect the offshore counts to keep climbing over the next 2-3 days. Western Outdoor News — Saltwater's Dana Wharf report and the wider spread of dorado and yellowtail on kelps up toward Santa Cruz Island both point to a warm tongue that hasn't broken down yet — as long as sea-surface temps stay in the high 70s to 80-degree range off San Clemente, the yellowfin schools working the paddies there should keep providing shots on the troll and on the drift with live sardines.

Around the full moon, expect stronger tidal exchanges than a typical week — bigger swings tend to concentrate bait and gamefish around structure and current breaks for a shorter window each day, so timing trips around the peak tide changes rather than fishing the whole day flat is worth planning for, especially for boats working the paddies or working bait schools on the troll.

Sand bass should keep showing in numbers near the border through Labor Day weekend, based on the pace of PIER's tagging program — over 1,000 fish tagged this season is a big number for this point in the summer, and it typically signals a strong resident population holding through September before the fall push offshore starts to thin the schools out.

Surf anglers who've been waiting out the rough El Niño surf finally have a window worth using. Surf Fishing In So Cal's read that August is the best opportunity of the year so far suggests conditions off the San Diego coast have settled enough to fish comfortably; if that swell pattern holds through the upcoming weekend, this is likely the best multi-day stretch for wading the beach breaks since spring. Anyone who's been sitting out the surf game should watch the forecast closely and plan a weekend session rather than waiting for a guaranteed calm day that may not come again for a while.

No hard weather or buoy data came through for this cycle, so treat sky and wind conditions as unconfirmed and check a local marine forecast before running offshore, particularly for smaller boats heading toward San Clemente Island.

Context

A summer built around a warm-water push toward 80 degrees at San Clemente Island, with dorado and yellowtail scattered as far north as Santa Cruz Island, is a fairly classic SoCal pattern for late August — warm-water species tend to track north along the Channel Islands chain through late summer before pulling back as water cools into fall. The Dana Wharf full-day count (43 yellowfin for 26 anglers) reads as a strong, on-schedule showing for this point in the season rather than an early or late anomaly.

The surf-fishing side of the picture is the more notable story this year. Surf Fishing In So Cal describes 2026 as one of the worst surf-fishing stretches in over a decade of covering the San Diego coast, with elevated surf tied to El Niño running from May through July with barely a break. That makes the August improvement the outlet is reporting a genuine turnaround rather than typical seasonal variation — a season that was shaping up as a washout for surf anglers is only now opening up.

The sand bass tagging pace (over 1,000 fish marked by PIER this season near the border) is presented in the source material as a notable number, though no baseline comparison to prior seasons was available in the feeds used here — so it's fair to call the sand bass push active and on-schedule for late summer without claiming it's unusually large or small versus past years.