Breakwall Dan and I were feeling eupeptic about this morning’s propitious conditions.  We had a six‑and‑a‑half‑foot tide at 8:30, one‑foot swells, warm weather and a bucket full of top quality enteromorpha algae for bait.  Also, the dock counts are still reporting sportfishing boats from San Pedro and Long Beach catching double digit numbers of opaleye daily.

    The top of the bluff where the trail down starts has been crumbling rapidly the past twelve months.  For the 10 years I’ve been coming here, it always looked stable but now the top rocks we use to step down are just about ready to join several other recent landslides at the water line.  There are a lot of small sharp rocks in the trail, too.  Trying to avoid them caused me to fall on my bony ass, leaving a nice sitzmark in the thick dust for Dan to view on his way down.

    A little after six I tossed out a few handfuls of chum into the water around the right side of the point, then started flinging the Fish Trap here and there while waiting for the skies to brighten.  With nothing interested in the lure, I grabbed my bait rig and joined Dan on the casting rock.  We rotated our positions deasil so that our lines would not meet as the current drifted our bobbers left‑to‑right.

    What I have noticed while fishing this spot throughout the years is that the first fish caught early in the morning are always the largest, then smaller and smaller ones bite, until two hours into it the remainders are so teensy they don’t stick to the hook.  They nibble away the bait with surgical precision.

    At a quarter to seven I hooked and landed the first opaleye of the day, one which didn’t even weigh a pound but would still make two tacos.  Not a good sign.  This means the next fish will be even smaller.  They were.  For the next half-hour or so we had lots of bites but none of the midgets stuck to the hook.

    The gate to the next place I wanted to try, Long Point, doesn’t open until eight o’clock, so we stuck it out here until then.  One cast of mine resulted in getting caught up in some small kelp strands not far from shore.  I pulled back on the line and when the hook freed, the bobber and bait shot into the rocks below my feet.  I reeled quickly so as to not let the line get caught up, and as I lifted the pole for another cast, I felt resistance.  Golly me, it was an opaleye surprisingly weighing slightly over a pound.  Cool, now we know where to cast.

    Instead of 15 or 20 feet out there, we adjusted our hook depths to four feet and gently tossed out about six feet away.  We started to see more ferocious hits as our bobbers went down several times before I caught a third opaleye of one‑and‑a‑half pounds.  As I was sticking it the gunnysack, Dan hooked up.  The fish was putting up an adamantine fight as he worked it slowly in and out of the whitewater around the shoreline rocks.  Dang, it looked like my favorite myrmidon was going to once again catch a bigger one than me.  As he lifted it out of the water I saw that he indeed did beat me size wise, with a two-pounder.  Unfortunately it was a detritus-feeding zebraperch , fun to catch but not very palatable.

    As predicted, even though we kept the water in front of us well chummed, little guys showed up to persistently swipe the bait from our hooks.  By eight we weren’t seeing any bites at all.

    So, back up the trail we went for a shot at Long Point.  As soon as we pulled into the parking lot I knew this spot was not likely to produce.  There were several scuba divers suiting up to take advantage of the exact conditions we were after, plus the water was Catalina clear everywhere we looked.  We hustled down to get set up at the usual opaleye spot to the left of the point.  Sure enough a pair of divers launched right in front of us, about five feet from where we cast our bobbers.  Yeah, yeah, they have the whole ocean, ad nauseum…

    We slid over to the right of the point, hoping they would scare the generally skittish opaleye over there.  We chummed the water and cast out.  It was slow going for sure but I finally had a hit.  This one felt like my largest opaleye of the day and as I brought it to color I saw it was indeed a three‑taco.  Before I could attempt to lift it out of the water, the fish gave a big yank, came off the hook and swam off.

   As more and more divers showed up our bite was really slow.  It seemed like a half hour went by before I hooked up again, this time landing a three-taco opaleye, my fourth in the bag.  I put a bunch of bait into the water hoping to attract more fish but it wasn’t working.  We planned on staying until ten o’clock and at a quarter ‘till, when a dive class of fifteen students showed up, we in a torpor turned our whole ocean over to them.

    Oh well, the only condition we were lacking this morning at Opaleye Point was a swell.  You don’t want it too big, but some two-footers coming in stirs things up nicely to get ’em goin’ even though I have caught a bunch there before with no waves.  Also I would suggest to myself that if I pick another Saturday to fish, make sure it is cold and stormy so the divers stay home.

Top