Checking the swell chart this morning I saw the whole coast of So. Cal. was under siege from massive swells of up to ten feet.  That’ll just about end a fish trip to Palos Verdes about as soon at it starts.  There was one glimmer of hope for today’s incoming tide, a relatively calm area around Marineland reported to be only three feet.

    It was low tide when I visited the Colorado Lagoon slime pit, with much of the muddy enteromorpha to be had with a special delight of clean, bright green fresh crispy strands in the water.

    As I rounded P.V. Drive South just west of Western Ave, the first glimpse of the San Pedro Channel was an ugly one.  Big swells as far as one could see, and at the bluff top at the San Vicente fishing access parking lot, in plain view were whitecaps at a height of eight feet by twenty feet long.  Needless to say, all my favorite opaleye holes near the points were un-fishable.

    That led me to the cove at the old Marineland.  My first casts with the Fish Trap and the enteromorpha opaleye bobber rig were made to the south of Long Point, where the swell petered out enough to be barely comfortable.  An hour there with no bites in water resembling pea soup, I moved on to try the very back of the cove.

    I filled the bobber a little less than half-way with water so that I could cast a hundred feet to a pair of boiler rocks.  It was somewhat difficult to keep the rig steady and in one spot due to gusts of up to 30-miles-per-hour cutting across the cove from the west.  The swell wasn’t much of a factor, with an occasional set of three-footers rolling in.

    I stuck it out for an hour with the bobber going down four times with no hook-ups.  It was hard to tell if I was snagging the bottom or what as I was at a depth of eleven feet.  After one bobber dunking, I set the hook and for sure was on stuck to the bottom as I pulled the rod back trying to break free of what weeds or other hazards may have consumed it.  Then the bottom fought back.   ZZzzZZzzZZzzZZzz, there it went, pulling drag from my Mitchell 302 straight out fast and furious before stopping.  Then the monster headed to the right, coming near the rocks a bit before making its second run.  Considering I was using fifteen pound test, I reached for the drag knob to loosen it little, but too late.  One big yank, snap, gone.

    Dejected, broken-hearted and whatever other sad word in the book is what I felt.  No matter what you hear, parting is not sweet sorrow.  I thought, that better have not been the world record opaleye I’ve been pursuing the past 25 years.  It couldn’t have been.  Ain’t no 15lb opaleye going to pull line off a reel like that.  As I grabbed my Fish Trap outfit to cast, I figured it was a white seabass, as it fought just like the big one I landed on the 20-lb outfit back in 1998.  In any case, that was a once in a lifetime hit likely to never happen again while using algae bait.

    Recent reports from Catalina Island indicate the big croaker are just now starting to show along the backside.  The shore along Palos Verdes is a similar habitat, as they like hanging just behind the surf line near the break between the off-color water created by wave action and the clearer waters brought in by off-shore currents.  The cove at Marineland has all these ingredients.  One might ponder the reason a meat-eating giant seafish would inhale algae.  My conclusion is that the bright green wad resembled a jig moving up and down with the swell.  I’ve caught several nice calicos this way.

    Casting the Trap like a wildman for twenty minutes produced nothing, so back to the bait rig I went.  Another hour of that was ever so boring.  Walking back to the truck I psyched myself up to handle impending nightmares of love lost.

*****

Funny from Jim L.:

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