Fishing forecast for Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles fishes two different kinds of water. On the coast, Santa Monica Bay opens to the Pacific, and San Pedro Bay holds the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as one harbor complex. Inland, Castaic Lake and Pyramid Lake are State Water Project reservoirs north of the city, and California's Department of Water Resources lists largemouth, smallmouth and striped bass among the fish at Pyramid.

Best fishing times in Los Angeles this week

Majors run an hour either side of the moon crossing the meridian over Los Angeles, CA; minors, half an hour either side of moonrise and moonset. Where those widths come from: best fishing times and how we compute these times.

When these windows are not the right tool

Solunar theory is John Alden Knight's 1926 prediction; the ±60 and ±30 minute widths are convention, not calculation. The times are computed astronomy, the claim that fish feed inside them is not. The day rating follows moon phase — identical nationwide, so every city shows it the same. A moving front beats the moon: apps that read pressure.

Where to fish in Los Angeles

This page is built around Santa Monica Bay, with LA Harbor and Castaic in reach — both salt and fresh water, about 30 minutes from the middle of Los Angeles.

Pyramid Lake is a reservoir formed by Pyramid Dam on Piru Creek near Castaic, off Interstate 5 north of Santa Clarita, in the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests, and it is seasonally stocked with rainbow trout.

Castaic Lake is 41 miles from downtown Los Angeles by California State Parks' count, and with 29 miles of shoreline it is one of the State Water Project's largest recreational lakes. The bay and this reservoir are the two halves of fishing in Los Angeles.

The Port of Los Angeles says it has ranked as the No. 1 container port in the Western Hemisphere for 26 consecutive years, 2000 through 2025, and with the Port of Long Beach it forms the San Pedro Bay port complex, which it ranks ninth in the world on 2024 throughput.

The nearest grids we publish are San Diego, CA (179 km, Mission Bay) and San Francisco, CA (559 km, San Francisco Bay). Different water, and different minutes.

What you can catch in Los Angeles

State listings put these 6 fish in the water around Los Angeles. Plan around the peak, not the open season.

Kelp bass, which CDFW notes are also known as calico bass, take their name from kelp forests, and those forests change between years. NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries says El Niño events, with severe storms and warm water, often devastate kelp forests, and that warm water and wave energy caused high kelp mortality in southern California during the 1997–1998 El Niño.

CDFW gives the spawning season of California halibut as April through July, which lines up with the April-to-July halibut peak in this page's species table.

White seabass eat market squid along with Pacific mackerel, anchovies, herring, sardines and pelagic red crabs, according to California Sea Grant, and spawn from March to September with a peak in late spring and early summer. The squid themselves gather to spawn usually over sandy habitat, NOAA Fisheries says.

Tackle sits outside a forecast page: start with how to catch largemouth bass.

Water temperature and season in Los Angeles

Air here swings 13.1 °F across the year, from 57.6 °F in December to 70.7 °F in August. Water is measured separately, and it is not the same number: against these air normals the gauge reads 2.6 °F warmer in December and 1.1 °F colder in August.

Monthly climate for Los Angeles, CA. The air line is the NOAA NCEI climate normal for 1991–2020 — the thirty-year average of a calendar month, not the weather of any one year — measured at LOS ANGELES INTL AP, CA US (USW00023174), 18.5 km from the middle of town, with 26–27 of the thirty years behind each month. The water line is neither a normal nor the air: hourly readings at NOAA gauge Santa Monica (9410840), 24.4 km out, averaged by calendar month over 2015–2025 — 11–11 complete years per month. It is the surface at the gauge, not the water on any particular spot, and it lags the air by weeks, so the two lines are not interchangeable. Read into this site on 2026-09-14.

Both columns describe the coast — air at LAX, water at the Santa Monica gauge — and the reservoirs inland appear in neither. At the gauge, a warm year and a cool one sit almost as far apart as winter and summer: October has averaged anywhere from 62.7 to 71.7 degrees, against 10.7 between the January and August means. The warm-water visitors on this page follow those years more closely than the month column.

Sunrise, sunset and daylight in Los Angeles

The moon window moves daily; the sun does not. Plan a season against this block.

The longest day of 2026 is June 21, 14h 26m; the shortest, December 21, 9h 53m. The meridian passing drifts about 50 minutes later daily: a dawn window this week is an afternoon window in a fortnight.

In southern California, NOAA Fisheries says, market squid spawn between October and May, while central California's squid spawn from April to October. In both, the squid reproduce right before they die, at about a year old.

At Los Angeles's latitude the June solstice brings about 14 hours 25 minutes of daylight and the December solstice about 9 hours 53 minutes, a difference of roughly four and a half hours.

Los Angeles has a dry summer and a wet winter: the 1991–2020 normals at LAX put 9.81 of the year's 12.23 inches of rain in December through March and only 0.23 inches in June through September. The same normals put the warmest afternoons at LAX in August and September, at 76.7 and 76.5 degrees.

License and seasons in California

Rules for California come from the California agency, and the calculation behind the table is set out in how we compute these times.