I finally broke down and bought a digital camera.  Co-worker Louie showed me the underwater bat ray viedo he shot with his Pentax Optio.  I just had to have one.  It took me all last week to work through the 200-page manual that came with it.  Click on the highlighted links in this story to see how well it does for still shots.  I also recorded a video of my bobber floating in the water and going down with a fish bite.

    You know that old gag about going to a fight and a hockey match broke out?  Today I went opaleye fishing and caught a bunch of bass.  With a 0.4 low tide at 4:45 the platform rock at Opaleye Point was accessible for at least 1 hour, depending on how large the swell is.  Checking the Swell Chart upon waking this morning, I saw Monday’s eight-foot surge was now down to four, which is tolerable.

    However, after I descended the trail and stood at the passage from shore to rock, I saw that even at low tide the largest waves in the sets were washing over where I wanted to stand.  What motivated me to suck it up and move out there was that all of the thick kelp which usually is right in front of the rock preventing casts is now gone.  Only a few stringers are still around to the right.  We had the same conditions here back in ’98, a year when The Breakwall Crew caught lots of opaleye, calico bass and white seabass.

    Climbing out and up onto the staging rock was a slippery prospect but safe nonetheless.  The effort was rewarded on the first cast straight out with the five-inch Storm WildEye Mackerel as hooked and netted was a calico bass that eyeballed in at over two pounds.

    With that in the sack, the fan casting continued.  Over to the left I hooked another keeper calico going 14 inches.  A few casts later to the right I brought up a calico that might have been the legal 12 inches but I threw it back.  Five casts later I ran my lure to the side of the boiler rock straight ahead.  That resulted in another keeper calico of 13 inches.

    Not a bad hour.  I had just as many hits and misses as I hooked.  By seven o’clock I had not another bite on the lure and since the tide was coming in along with the swell I had to evacuate the platform for higher ground.  I wanted to try for opaleye from there but didn’t want to chance having to wade back.

    So I walked across the cove to try the ledge.  I was hoping for more bass action from the thick kelp there but after 20 casts with the WildEye I had not one bite.

    Out came the opaleye algae bobber rig.  The good stuff is still plentiful at Colorado Lagoon and when you put a dark green long and stringy wad in a bucket of water it is very manageable and stays on the #1 Owner Flyliner hook a long time.  Problem was that after chumming and casting until nine I had only the one bobber going down while shooting the movie.  BORING.

    After I got home I hung the big bass on the Normark scale, which read 2-13.

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