It was like a credit card commercial. 1999 fishing license, $30. Twelve bobbers and twenty-one hooks, $35. One gunnysack filled with three-taco opaleye, priceless. Actually, you can’t purchase the license on plastic. I used cash.

This morning I parked at the Opaleye Point trailhead and hiked along the beach to Long Point to fish the outgoing tide. I made my first casts at six o’clock with the standard five-inch blacksmith perch pattern Fish Trap on a five-eighths ounce leadhead. Out of thirty or so before sunrise casts from the pillar rock, I had six strikes from whatever bass were around. One hit in particular pulled pretty hard for a second before it let go. All this effort resulted in only one illegal calico of eleven inches being landed. I probably could have walked over to a spot more inside the cove and caught some sand bass like I did this past summer, but that wasn’t the reason why I was there.

I was after two-pound opaleye, which should be hanging out now that an influx cooler water has moved in. Last year on New Year’s Day, The Breakwall Angler crew caught over twenty opaleye apiece, with everyone involved keeping ten weighing between two-and-three-quarter and three-and-a-half pounds. Breakwall Darryl’s little brother Tim even caught one that was over four pounds.

From the staging rock I cast my enteromorpha set-up into the famous small rip current to the right. After a half hour with no hits, I started talking to my floater, saying things like, "Come on, come on, come on, go down you freakin’ bobber." A bit later, when it finally did submerge, the result was a nice two-pound opaleye being slid into the sack. Oh goodie, looks like they’re finally here.

If they were there, they weren’t making a big deal out of letting their presence be known. From seven until eight I caught only three others, all well below the two pound mark. After a while I wasn’t catching anything, not even having any bites. All in all the action was quite dead at Long Point. A contributing factor to this situation might have been the calmness of the water. Also, a big ugly sea lion came right up to the rock with his two girlfriends. He started barking at me as if he were really horny and needed his boudoir back. I don’t think the fish appreciated the trio’s presence, either.

A little after eight, I took a stroll back over the hump to try the Marineland ledge. The tide was out far enough so that I could walk to the tip and cast near the kelp strands in the green murky water. It wasn’t long before my bobber disappeared, but I could tell right away it was a little guy of just two tacos. I tossed him into a tide pool for safe keeping in case I had the opportunity to exchange it for some bigger ones later on.

I re-baited, then hopped back out to the end and tossed out. Immediately my bobber was pulled under by what was determined by the vigor of its fight to be a big one. Sure enough, a fat two-pounder was in the tide pool awaiting judgement hour. I wrapped another strand of bait onto the hook and again placed the bobber in the exact same spot. Two nibbles, then down it went with the swimming force of another two-pounder.

Since it appeared that I hit a hot spot, I retired the fifteen-pound outfit so I could splitshot a wad of enteromorpha with the ten-pound-test rod. This is finesse fishing at its finest. You tie the usual 1/0 hook to the end of the line and crimp a BB shot just above the knot. Then you cover the whole thing by wrapping a long strand of bait around it and cast it out to where you had all them bites with the bobber rig. With such a small amount of weight, the bait follows the currents, sinking ever so gradually. When you figure it’s almost at the bottom, you reel very slowly, feeling for nibbles as it comes in. That technique was working great. In the next hour I set the hook on seven more opaleye, topped by yet another two-pounder.

The only drawback to not using a bobber around all the rocks is losing hooks to the various underwater snags, especially with the light line. I lost three. Them darn Owner Flyliner hooks I was using cost about a buck apiece. I’ll have to keep a box of cheapie hooks handy for these occasions.

After nine-thirty, the bite went out with the tide. It was time to round up all the fish in the tide pool for the aforementioned judgement hour. I kept the four largest and returned the others back to the sea. I must not have seen a two-pounder in quite a while because the two largest out of the eight I kept only weighed in at 1-10, with one other tipping the scales at 1-8. The rest were just over one pound.

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