This year sand bass was a bust; the calico bass bite – now winding down – was somewhat better.  With current dock totals showing not much of these two species or opaleye, it would probably be a moot trip to fish the rocks of Palos Verdes this morning but I kind of needed to get out of the house to ameliorate the cabin fever depression that overcame me after our disastrous High Sierra backpack trip of last month.

    I had to find a scoop of algae bait for opaleye and as a backup in case Colorado Lagoon was out, this morning’s first stop was the Back Bay boat launch in Newport Beach.  Dang, there’s nothing at the mud bank where it usually grows.  I walked across the parking lot back to my truck stationed along the curb outside the pedestrian gate.  It was just before 4am, security personnel in an electric cart pulled up to check me out.  Hey, what’s up, he wondered.  I said I was looking over there for some algae for fish bait but there isn’t any.  He said, no luck eh, too bad, as if oddly enough he had heard that line before.  Some other opaleye nut must have stopped by recently.

    I took Back Bay Drive north and looked at several other mud banks where I have found it in years past but all were devoid of the green.

    Check three at Colorado Lagoon produced some long and stringy algae but it was coarse and didn’t smell exactly right.  Oh well, that’s all we got for today.

    By 5:30 I was casting my five-inch Storm WildEye mackerel from my large calico bass rock near the end of Hawthorne Blvd.  In the hour I used the big plastic I had one hit that didn’t stick.

    After light I tied on the bait Breakwall Darryl and I caught all the calicos with in August, a five-inch Berkeley Power Bait Jerk Shad Mullet pinned to a 3/8 ounce stand-up leadhead.  That seemed to work pretty well as I caught a sand bass and three calico bass in thirty minutes.  The Yang of that Yin was that all were well below the 12-inch minimum.

    While I was bassing, I chummed the area with algae in hopes of attracting large hoards of opaleye.  I retied my jerkbait rod with the opaleye bobber rig get-up and soaked that for an hour with zero action.  Bored and hungry, I was up the bluff and at the Busy Bee sandwich shop right at their 9am opening time.

    We need a good rain storm to blow through soon in order to grow some fresh long and gooey algae, otherwise we might have to hit up local reservoirs as trout are stocked.

*****

Breakwall Shane's High Sierra backpack trip photos from last month.

*****

From Ray R. in response to last month's Sierra trip:

Hi Mike –

As always, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your trip report… 

FYI – my son Brian and I were at Convict Lake for 3 nights the week before – as a matter of fact, we probably passed you going the other way, we were coming home on the 16th (my wife’s birthday).  Anyway, we killed the rainbows at Owens River (about halfway between Brown’s Camp and Crowley, nothing big (biggest was less than 2 pounds) but lots of willing fish, we probably had 60 fish between us (and that only fishing 2 – 3 hours a day.  Alas, no browns.

We had wind for most of the time too which made fishing Convict nearly impossible. 

Never tried the Breakfast Club in Mammoth, we usually hit “The Stove” – huge pancakes.

Take care and keep the great trip reports coming.

PS – I appreciate your going to all the trouble of keeping your ‘secret lake’ a secret.  I noticed that you photoshoped the name out of the pictures J

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