The day before Thanksgiving we here in So. Cal. had a nice drenching, which made the mats of ulva intestinalis at the Colorado Lagoon slime pit in Long Beach flourish into the perfect long gooey strands an opaleye guy needs for the green to stay on the hook longer after wrapping.

    At Opaleye Point in Palos Verdes this morning, I tided my rope around the fence railing and safely rappelled down to the trail.  Having a bladder full of morning coffee, I whipped it out real quickly for relief then heard the scrunch crunch of footsteps above.  I looked up to see another dude with a spear gun sliding down.  I said, oh man you caught me pissin’.  He replied, sorry bro, thanks for the use of the rope.  I asked, what are you going for?  He said, whatever… as he EEEOWWW ran down the trail.  Lucky me he went to the left as he reached shore.  It probably would be a bad thing to have a diver scaring off your quarry near the fishing zone.

    Nice, we had no wind and a small swell no higher than one foot.  The cloud cover was convenient, as at the ledge across the cove to the right of the point you face east into the rising sun making it difficult to follow your bobber when it drifts into the glare reflecting off a clear-sky day.

    I timed the drive perfectly so that I made my first cast for bass using the Berkeley PowerBait 5-inch Jerk Shad Mullet with a 1/4-ounce leadhead along the kelp lines right at six o’clock.  Two handfuls of algae went into the whitewash to get the opaleye going while I was busy with the lure.

    Thirty minutes of fan casting along the ledge resulted in zero bass bites, the morning light is enough now to get the bobber rig going.  Another wad of chum was tossed out.

    A half hour went by before any bites were noticed; finally I netted a one-pound opaleye, which was released.  The next hour I counted over twenty bites as the bobber wiggled and went down but nothing stuck to the hook.  I surmised them to be little guys.

    At eight o’clock I hadn’t a bite for a while at the mid-ledge hot spot so I scooted over further in to the large platform casting rock to flip the rig along the shore inside the cove, a spot only fishable during a high tide like today’s astronomical 7.5 at 8:45.  The water was all the way up to the base of the cliff in some spots.

    That paid off, my first five casts handed out several bait stealers, with the sixth toss the lucky one, resulting in the netting of an unusually hard fighting three-taco keeper opaleye.  It felt at least like a five-taco.

    That spot was good for nibbles for another fifteen minutes, then it was as if the volume knob was turned all the way to the left until, *CLICK*, they were gone.  The reason reared its ugly head in the form of something worse than a diver, a big fat sea lion rising just ten feet from where my bobber floated.  Crimeny.

    The one last spot I tried was to the immediate right of Opaleye Point for an hour starting at nine to catch a little of the outgoing tide I wished would stir up some action.  The conditions were perfect: small swell, gigantic tide, sun off the very clear water…  NOTHING!!!  This is the second trip in a row I only had one keeper to report.  I have two other non-Palos Verdes west-facing spots in mind to try this season but they need high tide and one-foot or less swells, at times a rare combination during winter.

*****

Fisherman swept off rocks near Pt. Fermin.

California native freshwater fish population on the verge of extinction.

Huge lobster netted in Dana Point.

Giant Chinook salmon found in Butte Creek.

*****

Saturday morning I got up early, dressed quietly, made my lunch, grabbed the dog, slipped quietly into the garage to hook the boat up to the truck, and proceeded to back out into a torrential down pour.

The wind was blowing 50 mph. I pulled back into the garage, turned on the radio, and discovered that the weather would be bad throughout the day I went back into the house, quietly undressed, and slipped back into bed.

There I cuddled up to my wife's back, now with a different anticipation, and whispered, "The weather out there is terrible."

My loving wife of 20 yrs replied, 'Can you believe my stupid husband is out fishing in that shit?

I still don't know to this day if she was joking, . ... but I have stopped fishing.

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