This week I gave up guiding for a solo trip to Palos Verdes to fish bass and opaleye.  Driving on the Riverside Freeway through the Santa Ana Canyon, the air was warm.  I actually needed the air conditioning on at 03:30.  Cruising west on the Garden Grove freeway past Santa Ana the air changed.  It was cold and had that refrigerated grocery store smell.  I thought maybe I had just passed something smelly but the air had the same aroma all the way to the Colorado Lagoon slime pit in Long Beach.

    One dilemma this week is that my parka of 15 years finally turned to dust.  I’ve been shopping around for one but have yet to commit the bucks.  At the pit, stepping out into the frigid air with rake and pale, I murmured to myself, “Self, let’s step up the jacket search”, as my usual long-sleeve blue cotton shirt wasn’t doing the job.  First thing to do at the fish hole this morning will be to wrap up into the rain suit before the first cast.  One wave upside the head on a cold morning and hypothermia will set.

    One sight that cut the chill was the abundance of high quality enteromorpha algae lining the banks of the lagoon.  A full scoop of dark green long strands was had in about sixty seconds.

    Since this morning’s swell chart showed all of the P. V. shoreline at one or maybe two feet, I went with the usual plan of first hitting up the end of Hawthorne Blvd. for bass before scooting on over to Long Point for opaleye.  At 04:55 I was a little early for the bluff-top parking lot sign which reads, no parking dusk to dawn.  The gamble I took was that the cops won’t patrol here until past dawn.  Down the trail I went.

    Thanks to a bright moon, I never had to use my headlight all the way to my usual very productive bass rock.  I removed my backpack, extended the net handle and within seconds of arrival made my first cast of the five-inch WildEye Live Sardine out to the boiler rock.

    Earlier, as soon as I entered San Pedro where the Harbor Freeway ends at Gaffey St., the air again warmed and stayed like that all the way down the trail.  As I stood there casting I could feel the cold mixing with the warm, signifying instability.  Also, as small breezes blew on-shore I could smell fish.  What I mean by that is I have an extra-sensitive olfactory naturally and can detect the scent of fish slime coming off the water.  I can also tell when snow crabs are around.  Today’s fare was calico bass.

    Twenty minutes of fan casting later I hooked a smallish bass of thirteen inches.  I tossed him into a tide pool in case it was the only catch of the day.  Casting all over the place I had no other bites until first light.

    There seems to be a pattern here.  When the swell is dead calm I hook up like nuts at the crack of dawn with all the fish attacking the lure right next to the casting stage.  Today was no different.  I must have had ten feet of line out from my rod tip and WHAMMO, a big one almost yanked the outfit out of my hands.  I hung in there guiding the behemoth back and forth away from the rocks and kelp, trying to tire it before scooping it up with the net.  Hell yeah baby, another calico over five pounds was lifted out of the exact same spot I caught the 5-14, the 6-7 and all the other two and three pounders in the last twelve months.

    It was good not having Breakwall Shane along today.  I’m sure that one would have been his if he were.

    With that bruiser safely stashed in the tide pool, out went the swimbait, only this time parallel to the rock.  BAM another nice one bounced onto the stage, a fat two-pound calico.  Three casts later along the side of the next rock over past a chasm, POWIE, a supplemental two-pounder was placed in there with the other three.  Now that I had some beefy ones, I released back into the wild the fourteen-incher.

    As per usual: the brighter the light – the lighter the bite.  I had no more hits in the next twenty minutes, off to fish other rocks back toward the trail.  I gave it another thirty minutes then was back at the truck by 07:00.  A quick weigh-in revealed today’s big one went 5-0, with the other two coming in at 2-1 and 1-15.

    Over at the Long Point property, which is now under new management and these days renamed Terranea, I strapped up my pack, grabbed the bucket and net and found the gate leading to the fishing grounds was locked.  The last few trips I saw the chain wrapped around the posts but there was no lock, making an early passage trouble-free.  Seems the new guys are a bit stricter.

    With some time to kill I hit up the local Ralphs for some holiday cooking supplies.  See, the whole family will be at my house next week for T-day and I’m the chef.  I was thinking maybe I can cancel my fresh turkey order and we can all have baked bass for dinner.  Can you imagine cleaning the thing with head on, filling it with stuffing, sewing it up and baking it all day?  Hmm.  I’d do it just to get my guests reactions.

    Back at the gate at a quarter ’till 8 I found it to be unlocked, off to the pillar rock I trudged.  Already the Santana winds were picking up, blowing left to right along the point.  This made it a little more difficult than usual to keep the opaleye bobber enteromorpha rig stuck in the zone, but the lack of swell – unusual for here – made fishing relatively easy.

    The problem was there wasn’t much around.  First, I didn’t pick up any fish slime odor coming in with the breeze and secondly in the first hour I detected little guys screwing with my bait.  The biggest evidence of that was when my first and only opaleye hook-up resulted in a one-taco specimen, which was returned.

    The normal pattern here, when we have a six-foot high tide at 09:30 like today, is that the bite picks up an hour before and stays good until an hour after the peak.  Today I could sum it up in one word; suckfest.

    I did wind up a first today.  In over 25 years of fishing opaleye with enteromorpha I never caught the other of three local sea chubs, a half-moon.  This morning I did but it only weighed a pound and they aren’t that great eating anyway, so back it went.  The other chub, the zebraperch, are commonly hooked while baited with algae.

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