Santa Barbara Landing

What they target

Trip types

Half-day (AM and PM)

Inshore Channel coast. Cattle boat. Live bait. Calico + sand bass + occasional halibut + perch + bonito. Walk-on availability common except summer weekends. Best for first-timers, kids, casual sessions.

Three-quarter day

Mixed inshore + offshore Channel grounds. Bigger boat, longer reach. Multi-species: rockfish, lingcod, sheephead, sometimes halibut on the way out, sometimes white seabass on a focused trip in season.

Multi-day to the Islands

Overnight to Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, sometimes San Miguel. White seabass + yellowtail kelp grounds in spring + summer. Rockfish in season. Reservations required, books out months ahead during white seabass peaks.

Charter trips

Private boat for groups of 6 to 25. Custom destination, custom species focus. Common for white seabass groups, bachelor parties, corporate trips.

Daily fish counts

Daily counts go live with the V1 app. Today's counts, 7-day rolling species averages, and 30-day species trends per landing pull into the verdict card and the Watch ribbon. Until then, check the landing's own daily report page directly.

Why landing counts matter

Of every data source in California fishing, the daily fish counts from sportfishing landings are the most reliable hyperlocal bite signal. The boats go out every day. They report what they caught. They report which vessel caught it, which trip type, which destination, and which species. No social-media noise, no community-broadcast catch locations, no aggregator-rounded numbers. Just a count.

The Watch ribbon in the GhostFingers Fish app surfaces a landing-counts delta when the species mix changes meaningfully day-over-day. White seabass jumping from one to twelve overnight is the signal to put a multi-day trip together. The app surfaces that signal automatically.