Dorado Flying Their Colors in Warming Local Waters

It’s a wild scene that plays out frequently for fishermen off Southern Baja California, but rarely for those off Southern California.

Thirty-one passengers aboard the Freelance went out Tuesday in search of sand bass and, perhaps, yellowtail. Instead they put 118 dorado weighing seven to 10 pounds on the deck of the three-quarter-day boat out of Davey’s Locker in Newport Beach.

Though dorado, a tropical to subtropical species referred to in Hawaii as mahi-mahi, show up here and there in Southland fish counts each summer, a bite of this magnitude hasn’t occurred locally since 1992, said Norris Tapp, part-owner of Davey’s Locker.

Tapp said Freelance skipper Chris Goble was traveling south to the fishing grounds off San Onofre when he spotted a large, floating kelp paddy. Beneath the paddy, he said, were at least 500 iridescent, green and gold dorado.

Besides the 118 fish landed, 300 or so were lost, Goble said.

Tapp credits an unusually warm band of water one to three miles off the Orange County coast that has suddenly turned “from an off-color green to a purple, crystal-clear blue,” providing a northbound avenue for the game fish.