Lately Breakwall Darryl has been anxious to take another productive boat ride aboard the S. S. Chaparral to the Point Vicente rock.  It’s been over two months since our last voyage.  We planned for today but at the last minute he was scheduled to work.

    So, at the last minute I gave good ol’ Breakwall Dan a call yesterday wondering if he would like to join me in some rock action.

    The two of us were peering down the cliff at Via Vicente this morning at six trying to decide where we should begin yet another day of green bait casting.  Looking to the right, most of the usual rocks were already disconnected from shore due to an incoming tide, expected to be high in two-and-a-half hours.  To the left there might have been one little spot to stand on in relative safety, but with the two of us unfamiliar with that area, compounded by the early morning darkness and three foot waves pounding in, we jumped back in the truck for somewhere we were more comfortable with.

    Merrily down the Opaleye Point trail we went, with a bucket filled with high quality enteromorpha, making our first casts to the right of the point twenty minutes before sunrise.

    We agreed to give this spot an hour to show us some action before we searched for another place that could.  With strands of chum distributed into the casting area by perfect two-foot swells, first light allowed us to see that indeed our bobbers were being taken down, albeit with no hook-ups.  After a half hour of this sort of relentless teasing I finally hooked one, an opaleye weighing barely a pound, nonetheless worth two tacos.

    Fifteen minutes of hits passed, obviously little guys, before I hooked another.  Feeling much larger than the previous, I played it in nice and easy.  Before I could reach for the net, the hooked popped out and he was on his way.

    As I was wrapping another long strand of enteromorpha around my hook, Dan hooked up to something of size.  He too played it nice and easy up to the whitewater and rocks and as I grabbed the net handle his rod went limp.  Dang, the fish today are biting short, barely getting the hooks into their mouths, coming off easily with minimal pressure.

    Oops, upon further inspection a curly-q was found at the end of the line, indicating a critical malfunction of the knot.  Dan was a big man announcing, gee, my hook came untied, as he easily could have sauntered back to the bait bucket, tied on another and resumed, like I would have done, never admitting to a fundamental mistake like that.  Anyway, I recommend the Trilene Knot for tying everything with monofilament, a technique which has served me well for years.

    Our hour of testing Opaleye Point came to a ho-hum end as we detected no bites for quite a while.  We packed up and ascended the trail for the quick drive to Via Vicente.  There we parked in front of the house I thought I remembered as the one across the street from the trailhead.  We gathered our equipment from the back of the truck, jumped over the railing and found ourselves trudging through a nature preserve of sorts, with carefully planted coastal sagebrushes and other assorted flora irrigated with drip tubes.  We made a special effort to step between the saplings as we made our way to the bluff.  Jeez, we were way off, about a hundred yards.  The trail was way over there.  I scraped the cholla balls off my boots before taking the official walkway back to the truck.

    Alas viewing the fishing areas from the trailhead, we saw that if the all of the cool casting rocks weren’t completely submerged, they were inaccessible from shore.  And it was an hour before high tide.  Oh well.

    The last stop of the day was a place I’ve been wanting to investigate since the great opaleye influx of November 2002, my old Alma Mater, the Redondo Breakwall.  I inserted nine quarters into the meter to give us a three-hour attempt then marched forth.  Along the marina docks as we walked out, we saw the whole inner harbor filled with opaleye of varying sizes, from one inch to 10 inches.  That was a good sign.  There was one school of about 20 hanging out with one of them looking like two tacos.  I dropped a wad of green bait next to the group right in front of where ‘no fishing’ was painted on the sidewalk, but the fish scattered as soon as the splitshot hit the water.

    The usual opaleye zone at the breakwall is at high tide from the beach to where the concrete top ends near the yacht club.  I guessed the fish were around as it was practically elbow-to-elbow fishermen lining that whole section.  As we aimed for a gap between people to set up we checked some of their catches.  One dude was cleaning two opaleye over two pounds and another had sargo and halfmoon.  It looked like they were using ghost shrimp for bait.

    In an hour of casting we had a few small bites but no hook-ups, like one guy on the left of us and another on the right.  They both reeled in three-taco opaleye as we watched.  I already knew we were kind of late, getting there after eight, but with the mild three-foot swell washing up and down the rocks at high tide we might as well stay a while.

    At one point a big wave came up, knocked over our bucket and washed out all of our bait.  I said, crap, that’s it, time to go.  Then I saw that a lot of our bait was actually pushed up into the rocks.  I crawled under a few boulders to retrieve enough to last a couple hours.  At least the water in front of us was well chummed.

    After a while we saw that it was not only us who were not having any luck, but all the other folks around were also having no success.  Bored out of our gourds we headed home by 10:15.

    I think I’ll wait for Breakwall Darryl to whip out the S. S. Chaparral before I waste my time with these stupid opaleye again.

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