Last time we fished Balboa Jetty in Newport Beach there was un hombre down there carrying around a nice calico bass on a rope.  He saw I was flinging a Fish Trap, saying a lot of Danglers use those here but don’t catch much on them anymore due to the spook factor.  He says he now uses plastic lizards starting at 3am and does well.  Also I mentioned I nailed a few sand bass using anchovies on the bottom, he tipped that grocery store shrimp works better for the sandies.  I guess the moral here is, try something different than the rest of the crowd.

    So there I was, at 03:15 this morning, setting up at the end of the jetty, sending out a previously frozen tiger shrimp on a 3/0 hook to be anchored down by a three ounce spoon weight.  I clipped a bell to the rod and set the rig in a sand spike, then cast here and there tight to the outside rocks with my Yum 7” green pumpkin Zellamaner ($3.95 for 10 at Wal-Mart) rigged Texas style with a ½ ounce bullet weight.  For a half hour I tossed a 50-yard stretch every ten feet with no takers.

    My bell went off, I stepped over to check that out, I gave the fish some slack, it took off then stopped suddenly.  I waited for five minutes before reeling in to find a mangled shrimp still skewered to the hook.  How dare what ever it was spit it out like that!

    I re-baited, cast out and continued with the lizard, covering another 50-yard stretch of inside rocks.  Again nothing doing the next thirty minutes.  What’s great about fishing like this Texas style is that since the point of the hook is buried into the plastic, you can make it crawl right on the rocks without losing many.

    Back at the sand spike I switched to a different kind of plastic that caught my eye while I was at the store shopping for lizards, the Yum 3.25” crawdad.  These things look great plus they’re hollow, so you can insert a ½ ounce ball leadhead into the body, make the loop come out the tail and bury the hook point into the extra thick head.  All the hardware is hidden nicely.

    Well, that worked a little better, at least I had a sizeable hit in the next hour.  Also I had another bite on the shrimp.  Same results, the fish spit it out.  I cast the crawdad for a while with no action then switched over the the trusty 5-inch Fish Trap.  Boring.

      At dawn I switched over to using peas for opaleye while the shrimp soaked.  I figured since we had so much rain the last week the enteromorpha would be unavailable, didn’t even stop by to check.  This time I used Vons brand peas.  They were horrible, half of then were white and they smelled badly.  I’m sticking with Picksweet for next time.  I had some bites using a #10 egg hook but they were little guys like grunion or topsmelt.

    Another dude was working his way out with a lure of some sort.  He started fishing the inside rocks near where the surf line is on the outside.  By the time he made it to the end where I was he had a nice 14-inch calico while using a four-inch pearl colored Zoom swim bait, and claimed to have caught six other shorties.

    I had two other hits on the shrimp, one spit it out, the other went into the rocks and broke off.  Conditions were fine, no swell, barely a breeze.  The water was a bit cloudy due to the Santa Ana river about three miles away still dumping a lot of silt and sand.  Water clarity was something like five feet, not sure if that affected my poor outcome.  At 08:00 on my way out I passed Mr. Calico and mentioned he’ll eat fish tacos while I eat shrimp tacos.  Leftover bait, you see.

From Dov in response to our El Cap trip of 2/5:

A few more weeks and I think the bass will be all over those 'dads. I went out with niece/nephew/bro-in-law and fished 6 hours before the super bowl. In that whole time my nephew was the only one to hook up, but it was SO worth the trip to Snail Lake in the pursuit of large mouth. He was throwing a top water buzz bait early morning, and I saw that he had a follow. I instructed him to throw back in the same spot, as close to the weed break as possible. As soon as the bait hit the water, he began reeling, "WHAM!!" a nice 2 pounder sprang through the air and landed with an ear pleasing "KEER-PLUNK". The boat was alive with excitement, as we yelled and screamed much louder than any of us did that evening at the super bowl. The fight was on, and after 45 seconds a nice 2 pounder was landed and then released. If a 2 pounder can create that much excitement, I only wonder what the spawn will bring :-)

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